LIBRARY OF CONGRESS. 



Chap Copyrio-ht Eo. 



UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 



ELECTRICITY 



AND THE 



RESURRECTION 



OR 



T'he Soul and Science 



BY 

WILLIAM HEMSTREET 

1333 bergen street 

brookx,y:n, N. Y. 

( Correspon de n ce Solicited ) 



CHICAGO 
tlNITERSAL, truth: PtlB. CO. 

87-89 WASHINGTON ST. 



43513 



l-5b>"Mry of CongresA 

SEP 5 1900 

Cotynght tutry 

SlCC-NO copv. 

O^Hvere^ to 

0«DtR DIVISION, 

SEP 7 1900 






Copyright, igoo, by William Hemstreet. 



74340 






^ CONTENTS. 

CHAPTER PAGE 

I. A Synopsis ---9 

II. The Substance of the Soul - - . - 35 

III. Etheric Life - - - - - - --57 

IV. PsYCHiSM 99 

V. Psychic Phenomena ------- 119 

VI. The Substance of Life Principle - - - 144 

VII. Spiritualism and Ghosts ----- I59 

VIII. The Theology of Etherism . . . - 186 

IX. Spirituality 199 

X. '* There is a Spiritual Body" - - - - 231 

XI. *' There is a Spiritual Body" — Paul - - 262 



ELECTRICITY AND THE 
RESURRECTION. 



CHAPTER I. 

A SYNOPSIS. 

Dreams — Intuitions — Personal magnetism — We are bits of 
God — Resurrection is not immortality — Definition of soul — 
Ethereal substance — Reflex powers of morals — Soul is primal 
— The luminiferous ether is the body of God — Electricity is 
the motion of ether — The ethereal body is the spiritual body — 
Matter and mind connate and inseparable — Will force is ma- 
terial force — The soul is an organism — Copula of the resur- 
rection. 

When we awake from holy dreams and there are 

yet lingering with us their fragrance, delightful music 

that never was heard, inspiring poetry that never was 

written, and angelic companions who for the time 

cheered and consoled us, we are loath to return from 

those rapt illusions to unwelcome earth, wondering in 

disappointment and longing if they were parts of a 

permanent nature, and whether they show us that the 

soul when unshackled of the body may immediately 

take wings to other realms and finally walk in groves of 

9 



10 ELECTRICITY- AND 

complete rest and peace. Do the visions of dying 
saints, of those who have returned from the gates of 
death, or of babes who ''see something" point us on- 
ward to another land ? If we patiently follow out this 
common experience, aided by science, shall we some 
day find a rational assurance of its reality and contin- 
uance? Let us make use of what we really know to 
solve this supremest problem for ourselves, for the 
wayfaring man and woman, and, too, for the people 
of mammon and satiety. 

Now, more than ever, the question is before the 
matter of fact world. "If a man die shall he live 
again?" We hear it upon the streets and see it in the 
daily newspapers. The pulpit is gradually losing its 
influence because of its perpetual and unchanging de- 
mands upon blind credulity ; and plain people are ask- 
ing: ''Do science and reason cast a ray beyond the 
grave ?" Let us see if by common sense we can get a 
clue to Paul's ^'spiritual body'' within us that is a thing 
apart from the physical body, is of ultimate ethereal 
matter and therefore indestructible in its essence, and 
is kept together and pushed forward by the conserving 
forces of Love, Hope and Moral Purity. 

We will not speak of Immortality, because that is 
too great a subject for the finite mind to grasp, but we 
will speak of the Resurrection from this changing, 
earthly condition into one of security, permanence 
and happiness. Along the paths of Eternity, under 
the highest states of blessedness, we have a vague in- 



THE RESURRECTION, n 

stinct that we might get tired of it all. But this earth 
does not tire all of us, and just as we are fit to live we 
die ; so we want another chance. 

We say soul is matter, a refined and ethereal matter 
that thinks, and by reason of that matter being homo- 
geneous, simple and ultimate, exists onward when it 
escapes the body. The universal luminiferous ether is 
the conscious God. Our souls are detached bits of that 
essence, from and in the first protoplasm-in-embryo, 
up. As matter and cohesion are eternal, so too are 
ether and mind. 

We must also start with the assumption that the uni- 
verse is composed of mind and matter as two separate 
and distinct qualities, conditions or things, antithetical 
in character, although inseparably united. There can 
be no mind without matter and no matter without mind. 
How they are united we need never inquire, for we 
can never find out any more than we can find out 
how matter attracts. We shall waste no time in try- 
ing to learn what matter is, but will regard it as we 
commonly understand it; i. e., as a realism adapted to 
our physical senses and the opposite of mind. Ether is 
the body of our minds, as the cosmic universal ether 
is the body of God. If the ether is imperishable, then 
the soul is imperishable, and its continuity is an easy 
result of will power and moral fitness. Let us study 
phenomena and see. 



12 ELECTRICITY AND 

The main proposition here will be, necessarily, often 
repeated, like a student's reviews, to keep it in mind 
through all the analyses of various phenomena. We 
have taken the position that mind cannot exist but with 
something else that is not mind, in the future state as 
here. 

'There is nothing but substance and its modes of mo- 
tion." — Spinoza. 

From this text we proceed. I think, therefore I 
exist. To think, there must be something else beside 
the thought to do the thinking. We cannot conceive of 
a thought existing alone — ^by itself. It must have a 
location and that location implies that it is a spatial 
thing of length, breadth and thickness, and has form 
and substance in the disembodied state as well as here. 
So there can be no mind without some other thing 
for it to be hitched to. That other thing is material 
substance. But what kind of substance? 

Assuming with all religious cults that there is a God 
who made and is now controlling the universe, the 
human mind cannot comprehend Him as a vacuum, 
as an unsubstantial thing, as a consciousness that 
is absolutely unconnected with any kind of sub- 
stance. And assuming, too, that we are to live after 
death as spirits, we can form no idea that those spirits 
will be mere floating or abstract dreams without space- 
qualities, without form, features or surroundings. If 
God and our spirits are substance, then they relate to 



THE RESURRECTION. 13 

and persist with all other substances in the universe, 
and are subjects of science and of rational proof. 

By this word substance we mean some kind of mat- 
ter, thinner than the Hghtest gas, unatomized. Al- 
though we cannot know what matter is, or how the 
atom is put together from the ether, we know that it 
is not consciousness, but rather is that class of outward 
appearances like wood, stone, flesh, gas, etc. Some 
will say we cannot prove the real separate existence of 
matter. Well, we will go ahead as we commonly un- 
derstand matter to be, according to universal instinct. 
We will suppose that mind and matter are two separate 
qualities united as the human soul. 

Now, it is pretty well settled that there is pervading 
the universe a subtile substance called the Ether. This 
is supposed to be the parent of all physical matter. 
This ether has the omnipresence of God. It, or some- 
thing like it, is probably the immediate body of God 
per se, without any figure of speech. Why should not 
God have a body as well as man? Why may not the 
one cosmic mass of ether be the one personal God, just 
as well as the one mass of flesh can be the one in- 
telligent man? By regarding the universe as a ma- 
terial entity, why may not the spirit of God be 
immanent in that, just the same as intelligence is 
immanent in the atoms of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, 
nitrogen and sulphur, all of which are but the results 
of ether and compose the temple of the Holy Ghost, 



14 



ELECTRICITY AND 



i. e., man's body? "And God created man in his own 
image/' that is, the ethereal soul of man, the fleshy 
body being of no more permanence or fixity than a 
thistledown or jet of water. We can illustrate the 
durability of the soul-substance in this way: The 
motion of the ether is electricity. The minute seg- 
ment of an electric car pulley conducts a material force 
that will crash tons of iron through the streets, which 
material force is none other than the direct and im- 
mediate presence of the body and the soul of Almighty 
God. To move a ponderous thing requires a ponderous 
thing to be the mover. The whirling of the ether — 
God's body — ^by the will of God, as a man whirls his 
own body, forms the atoms, as the whirl of wind or 
water makes the powerful whirlpool or cyclone; and 
the mutual bombardment of these atoms by the direct 
will of God makes physical matter by molecules. ("An 
atom is a clot of ether." — Prof. J. S. McKay.) And 
the clot is only the motion of the ether by the indwell- 
ing will of God. Of this cosmic ether our souls were 
made. Therefore, the substance of the soul is like that 
of God's, imperishable, non-atomic, immortal. We are 
detached particles of God. Our physical bodies finally 
dissolve in spite of the will because they are atomic 
and molecular ; but were they ethereal and ultimate, we 
could make them live on as long as it would be our 
pleasure. The soul is an ethereal, non-atomic organ- 
ism, perfectly related to an unchanging ethereal en- 
vironment, and maintains its ethereal body by choice. 



A 



THE RESURRECTION. 15 

Even with the tendency of the earthly body to disper- 
sion, the will power keeps it together to the limit of 
its natural composition, the same as the will of God 
keeps the atoms together. 

When the fiery earth cooled off, God's enveloping 
will, in the oxygen and sunshine, detached itself into 
various living organisms in the thin surface crust, the 
fittest of which detachments survive the changes of 
matter as God survives. This is all there is about 
creation, organic life and the resurrection. 

The ether penetrates all physical matter between 
the atoms, as water penetrates a sponge or flows 
through cracked ice, the water and the ice being one 
thing in different conditions of chemical stress, the 
same as ether and^atter are one thing in different 
sjtress. Thus a steel rapier would penetrate a ghost 
only in appearance ; the more solid ether of the ghost 
would really penetrate between the atoms of the steel 
rapier. So the soul being invulnerable to all physical 
conditions and attacks, lives on by its own desire and 
the inherent inertia of the ego. It does not dissolve 
back into God's substance because it has personal self- 
love and His permission to live as one of His angels so 
long as it does not destroy itself from within by vice 
and sin. All that a soul needs for resurrection is a 
good moral constitution of hope, love, purity, integrity, 
justice, which qualities by their nature give the soul- 
body a reiUx propulsion across the coma of death, the 



1 6 ELECTRICITY AND 

same as we, by predetermination, can awaken our- 
selves at any fixed time out of sleep. 

"Immortality is a fact in man's nature." — Theo. Parker. 

The ether, or electricity, being such a mighty force 
as to crush and dissipate physical matter, is substan- 
tial enough to form and maintain a spiritual or ethereal 
body in the future life, and this without any violence 
to physiological analogy. Man, to be annihilated with 
his fleshly body, would be an unfinished work. The 
recognition of the Ether as the future realm of human- 
ity, opens up a scope and liberty of soul as much above 
our present enthrallment as the free and resplendent 
butterfly is above the helpless, earth-bound grub it 
once was. 

"There fields of light and liquid ether flow, 
Purged from pond'rous dregs of earth below." 

— ^John Dryden. 

Let US gradually adapt the understanding to a ma- 
terial substance and force that is not atomic. A horse- 
shoe magnet will pass physical force undiminished 
through a thick plate of glass and attract a piece of 
iron on the other side. What is the substance of that 
penetrating physical force ? There is no physical force 
except from physical substance. Force must have 
some real thing back of it. Is it a stream or whirl of 



THE RESURRECTION. 



17 



iron-ether from and of the magnet, passing through 
the glass, or is it a corkscrew whirl of intervening 
matter without any substance leaving the magnet ? So 
can electricity pass through glass or a stone wall with- 
out any wire or apparent conductor and produce a 
light or other physical phenomena on the other side. 
A person holding an iron bar, without friction, mag- 
netizes the bar so that it will impart separated magnet- 
ism to other bars and to iron filings. What is this 
force or animal magnetism ? Is it mere animal vitality 
alone passing into the bar, or is it a part of the will 
and soul? Are they different substances or are they 
one substance? The scientists tell us that ma gnetism 
and electricity are a ''mode of motion /' Mode of mo- 
tion of what? The magnet has no motion while it 
attracts; the trolley wire has no motion while it gives 
motion. We have noticed that the approach of another 
person is heralded by some occult objective influence. 
What is that invisible stream of force, substance, or 
mode of contact that precedes us ? Is it a transit, emis- 
sion or detachment of our mind-substance, or is it a 
mode of motion of our souls upon intervening sub- 
stance? May it not be mere bodily radiation? Our 
minds are all connected by this universal ethereal 
medium.. Through it shall we ever, when distant 
from one another, practically connect by our finer de- 
velopment, without wire of physical appliance? Are 
) we all the time in electric or spiritual touch but too 
dull to feel it ? From such simple, natural and related 



1 8 ELECTRICITY AND 

facts may yet evolve new systems of psychology and of 
religious and social philosophy. 



"I believe it is possible for people hundreds of miles 
apart to signal to one another without wires. Between 
you and the person there must be a common feeling. It 
most frequently makes itself felt in the hour of trouble 
and is often a call for help. The correspondence here is 
between heart and heart, and the medium through which 
the message passes is love." — Dr. Dwight Hillis. 



All mental action is the action of matter, but not 
necessarily of brain matter. It is of an ethereal mat- 
ter that is within but separate and discrete from, brain, 
flesh and blood. There is within us, as we shall see, 
an electrical or ethereal body, independent of and con- 
trolling the animal body. Materialism is reversed ; the 
body is the product and agent of the soul, and not its 
origin. 

The intent of this essay is to popularize, by simple 
scientific analogy, from facts which everybody can 
become familiar with, the theory that the soul is a 
self-continuing material entity, not an abstract con- 
sciousness ; that it operates beyond the body, dominates 
the body and is, like all substance or material element, 
indistructible, immortal and a part of science. 



, "For of the soul the body form doth take, 
\ For soul is form and doth the body make." 

— Spenser. 



THE RESURRECTION, 



19 



Many things are inserted here as intuitions, or 
analogies, as a natural outcome of a mind's harmony 
with nature. The animal instantly at birth knows how 
to feed and protect itself, and afterwards its progeny, 
without teaching. This is by intuition, which is an 
inherited knowledge or direct inspiration from God. 

"The actual discoveries of science render everything 
credible that can be proved to come within the compass 
of analogy." — Dr. Isaac Taylor. 

The corroborative quotations herein were found, in 
every instance, after their contexts were penned for 
this work, and are used to lend force to the present 
argument. If the author is an enthusiast he has found 
himself in good company. Many disconnected people 
concurring are likely to be on the right road. In the 
middle of the ocean one morning, under a narrow dome 
of mist, several officers of a ship were with sextants 
peering in different directions for the sun. None could 
determine where it was, but they struck an average of 
their conjectures, guided the ship by that, and in the 
afternoon w^hen the surrounding vapor was dispelled 
they found that the course taken was correct. 

''We are surer we see a star when we know that others 
see it also." — Henry George. 

Most of the world believe that what they cannot see 
cannot be. Men say that they will not believe that 



20 ELECTRICITY AND 

which they cannot know, yet they beheve they know 
their own children. In the realm of psychology we 
must look whither our intellectual parallaxes point. 
Even in physical discovery with microscope, telescope, 
measure and crucible, we do not always agree as to 
what is sensibly right before us without long, pains- 
taking and mutual effort. The mind as well as the eye 
has to be trained to recognize very apparent things. 
The eyes of the blind suddenly restored to perfection 
cannot see without gradual practice. 

In the New York City of desert pavement, thunder- 
ing, grinding, gritty, soulless, one tiny green oat-sprout 
in a curbstone joint showed that the living God was 
even there. Along those streets rushed a mass of hu- 
manity fighting hard for a livelihood, with as little con- 
cern for spiritual philosophy as brutes. What for 
honor care the thousands of those daughters of Eve, 
from basement and garret, hurrying along poorly 
clad, sandwich and dime novel in hand, to their sweat- 
shops and task masters, or to worse where they can 
find a warm heart though in the guise of sin? What 
for honesty care those desperate men and boys ? They 
tell us these moral sentiments will do to put into books, 
but they are not a part of practical life. A new gar- 
ment, a square meal, a theater ticket, a horse race, a 
ball game, are to them the first blessings. Any stray 
word of inspiration coming to their ears is scoffed 
at, and society is to blame more than they. But might 
not some plain and secular reasoning: as to the natural 



THE RESURRECTION, 21 

science of a future life, the science of a proud and im- 
mortal soul in each of them, and of a surrounding God 
demonstrated as near to them, be dropped like that oat 
seed into some crevice of their sterile hearts, to be- 
come a sprout of living hope, to show them that God is 
even there, and that Elysian fields are waiting for even 
them? 

And in the more pretentious grades of society there 
is the same blank indifference and ignorance as to the 
essence of the soul. King, judge, scientist, broker, 
society man, mechanic, laborer, scholar, dilettante — all 
are Ptolemaic as to the beyond. Some, from early 
influences, vaguely believe that they have a soul, but 
they stop there and are content, like Caesar and Cicero, 
that the earth is flat. We have as narrow a Mediter- 
ranean world spiritually as the ancients did geographi- 
cally. 

When we assert that soul is a separate and immortal 
substance we do not expect it to be believed all of a 
sudden. The world moves slowly. Conviction is a 
growth. Even true logic and facts are not readily per- 
suasive. ''With what body do they come?" is a ques- 
tion that theologians must answer in the concrete if 
they expect to arrest increasing agnosticism. The 
world is becoming too materialistic and sharp for ipse- 
dixits, mysticism and supernaturalism. If the resur- 
rected dead come with a body at all it can be demon- 
strated as a natural fact. There is no other way to 



\ 



22 ELECTRICITY AND 

make good the mansions in the skies, the New 
Jerusalem, Beulah Land and all the rest of Christian 
metaphor. The world is showing more and more that 
pulpiteers must come down to science. The common 
mind will always refuse to take hold of a mere senti- 
ment future or a metaphysical soul. The "spiritual 
body" of St. Paul's discovery is the vital core or focus 
of Christianity, and its rationale must be expounded 
before his revelation will be accepted. 

By this argument we may not quite demonstrate 
immortality, but we can detect some light ahead — 
where the sun is. The theory of a conscious soul cor- 
poreity, of ether or some other substance that is re- 
motely related to physical matter, and which is the 
body of God, will revolutionize society^, will produce a 
new religion, if by some pat formula or popular treat- 
ment it can be forced through the opaque shuck and 
shell of materialism that envelops us. 

It is not necessary to state that this book is not 
written for scholars ; it is for men and women at work 
at the bench, in the street, on the farms, or those 
maniac brokers who would appear like convicts if their 
clothing were as streaked as their souls. Simple lan- 
guage and illustration, as well as repetition in new 
dress, will suit the plain people and lift them out of 
their abstract idealism on the one hand or gross ma- 
terialism on the other. 



THE RESURRECTION. 



23 



The Roman masters of the world might have known 
that the world was round if they had only studied the 
sphericity of the raindrops and carried their figuring 
beyond the dip of their sails upon the Mediterranean. 
But later men who did so were put into jail. And we, 
if we put wings to analogy, may yet find the soul and 
its resurrection demonstrable from our present bodies, 
as we might count upon the butterfly, before ever see- 
ing one, by reading the inside of the caterpillar — 
watching the progressive development of the pupa. 

"Frcm this inert mass shall suddenly spring, like well 
clad Minerva from the head of Jove, a creature with no 
apparent kinship either with the case that enwrapped it 
or the lowly worm that preceded the chrysalis, a creature 
with soft elastic body as the air in which it floats, with 
spreading feelers and broad spreading wings, clothed 
with jeweled dust and silken hair which reflect the colors 
of the rainbow and in their delicate combinations defy 
the painter's pallette." — Scudder (Butterflies.) 

'The grub contains the whole of the future butterfly, 
not by generation but by development." — Grindon. 

We cannot conceive of the extinction of sentience, 
which is a basilar quality of the universe. Wherever 
there is the ether, which is the body of God, there is 
sentience. We plume ourselves too grandly and 
conceitedly upon our poor little physical combination 
of hydrogen, oxygen, carbon, phosphorus, sulphur, 
etc. ; but there are in the universe plenty of good or- 



24 



ELECTRICITY AND 



ganizations with all that left out. Break a magnet 
into pieces, and each piece will remain a distinct and 
polarized magnet. Pulverize it, and each particle of 
its dust remains a perfect magnet. Reduce it to atoms, 
and each atom will be a magnet. Reduce it to either 
and the attraction and life are still there. So it is with 
soul substance. The ether cannot be destroyed, and 
mind co-exists within and of it the same as its attrac- 
tion does. 

Various philosophers have tried to prove immor- 
tality, the most rational of them linking the mental 
ego with ^'A fine- material vehicle which is its im- 
mediate sensorium in this world and the seat of its 
recollections in the next/' (Ency. Britannica.) But 
some have made confusion by calling this ethereal 
vehicle of the mind an immaterial substance, deeming 
the word immaterial to mean simply not physical, or 
''whatever is not cognizable by the physical senses." 
Now add to the above mentioned theory of a ''fine 
material vehicle" the new theory of the persistence 
of matter, ether and electricity, and also the persistence 
of mind and morals, and the theory that the whole uni- 
verse has been made out of one fine homogeneous 
element, unparticled and unatomic, then we can easily 
understand the theory that the soul substance is ex- 
istent before and after bodily life in the sense that the 
essence of the soul is identical with the body and sub- 
stance of the ever-living God, of whom we are scin- 
tilations. 



THE RESURRECTION. 25 

If we are to live after this fleshly career it will be 
only by the law of connected cause and effect, and 
there is that within us now which scientifically predi- 
cates it. The ancients were wise, dominant and great 
like ourselves, but their notion of the earth beyond a 
few weeks, march or sail was as confined as our spir- 
itual fancies now are of what is beyond the grave. 
Let us boldly pass the Pillars of Hercules out into the 
mysterious ocean of the soul world and discover, 
beyond, the real and glowing continent of Hope for 
mankind. 



26 ELECTRICITY AND 



CHAPTER 11. 

THE SUBSTANCE OF THE SOUL. 

God and soul are not supernatural — Mental dynamics — 
Positive and passive people — Napoleon and Pitt — Personal 
radiation — Soul, mind and spirit synonymous — Will power 
is a material power — Powers of command — Free agency — 
Governing children — Political power — Vibratory laws — Hyp- 
notism, fluidic and suggestive. 

Many social and personal phenomena show the spir- 
itual body; they convince us that the mind has a direct, 
dynamic and material power over other minds, induct- 
ing its conditions, character and desires, suffusing and 
impressing them by both voluntary and involuntary 
force, without speech, sign or any bodily or physical 
media whatever ; that the will force of man is an inde- 
pendent and substantial force, and that its laws and 
methods of action are like those of physical forces. Men- 
tal conditions and characteristics are infectious like dis- 
eases, or are vibratory like light, heat and magnetism. 
They have a mechanical action aside from moral or 
logical influence. Whether that dynamic force of one 
mind upon another is an emission of its substance, or 
is a vibration or mode of motion upon the intervening 
ether, will be discussed laten 



THE RESURRECTION. 27 

"It is certainly agreeable to reason to believe that 
there are some slight effluxions from spirit to spirit where 
men are in each other's presence, the same as from body 
to body." — Lord Bacon. 



"Quite ordinary phenomena seem to indicate that the 
will of an individual does at times affect the ether or 
nerve atmosphere about him." — Hyland C. Kirk. 

"And I experienced that extraordinary emotion which, 
like the magnetic fluid, surrounds extraordinary desti- 
nies." — George Sands. 

Napoleon radiated his spirit upon his armies and the 
world as directly as any physical eflfect is produced, and 
without the aid of the ordinary sensible media. There 
had been poured into his organism from the sources of 
space, independent of heredity, a quantity of soul force 
that was as phenomenal as any physical fact. Outward 
nature supplied him, contemporaneously and directly. 

"The seed of genius falls directly from God's hand.'* — 
Gen. Lew Wallace. 

Some thinkers have attributed this involuntary and 
magical personal influence to mere bodily causes, such 
as tone of voice, look of the eye, or self-confidence or 
an overbearing manner. The materialists believe 
mind to be only the result of the molecular motion of 
physical matter in the body, and they endeavor to ac- 
count for many of the so-called mesmeric, telepathic 



28 ELECTRICITY AND 

and clairvoyant phenomena wholly by physical law, or 
by a joint action of mind or body upon the etheric 
medium that exists everywhere, connecting us all. 
While we incline to believe that the mind or soul is 
an organized body, super-physical, and has a direct 
effect upon other minds by laws wholly psychic or 
separate from physical law, involving in no degree the 
mediumship of physical or animal matter, yet if the 
body were incidentally brought in part into the rela- 
tionship of a medium of transmission, there still is a 
central and independent origin of pyschic power, a 
fountainhead or a seat of will, an interior soul-body 
that is as independent of the animal body as a man 
is independent of his house, or as a foetus becomes 
independent of its parent, or as a snail is of its shell. 
The will and soul-body may be utterly free of, and yet 
be temporarily allied to, a physical body, and be in- 
fluenced or reacted upon thereby, automatically when 
not under its own free volition and judgment. Bod- 
ily appetites, which are blind, temporal and without 
will, may sometimes overcome a weak and ignorant 
soul-will, but the latter is eternal and may dominate 
when it maintains its own most secret delicate poise 
upon its own throne. 

Men's characters and wills are strong precisely 
like their bodies, not morally but substantially and 
physically, as one electric or air current is stronger 
than another. It takes quantity and fibre of muscle 



THE RESURRECTION, 



29 



to make physical strength ; so it requires quantity of 
soul-substance to make strength of soul and will. 
There is the same difference between the density and 
fibre of souls that there is between the density and 
fibre of basswood and hickory, pewter and steel, or 
gold and brass. The exercise of authority requires 
material strength of will, using "material" in its com- 
mon meaning, not moral or intellectual strength. To 
command, where moral force is of no avail and in- 
terests are not a moving consideration, one needs vol- 
ume of soul-substance, the same as in physical force. 
Muscular force can only be exerted by will force. Will- 
ing is not material, but it is associated naturally with 
ether that is material, as cohesion is associated with 
miatter. Intellect and morals are not alone sufficient 
for power over other men. A human being's 
character works out from him involuntarily and me- 
chanically, as a stove gives out heat. If a man be not 
pure gold no building up will give him the value of 
gold; if he be not steel no whetting will make him 
cut ; if he be bad no art will conceal his badness ; if 
he be good his goodness will be felt without effort. All 
soul conditions radiate themselves involuntarily as a 
flower does its fragrance or a lamp its light or magnet 
its force. 

''If a teacher has an opinion that he wishes to conceal, 
his pupils will become as fully indoctrinated into that 
as into any which he publishes. If you would not be 
known as doing a thing, never do it." — Emerson. 



30 ELECTRICITY AND 

"Curse not the king, no, not in thy thought; and curse 
not the rich in thy bed chamber; for a bird of the air 
shall carry the voice, and that which hath wings shall 
tell the matter." — Ecc. lo, 20. 



The soul cannot conceal any more than the sun can. 
No lie was ever fully believed. Nor can ambition 
backed by energy and courage supply a want of inborn 
power. Dearth of natural pride, of gravity or dignity 
cannot be made up by affectation. Human beings 
pass on sight as coins do, for their intrinsic worth, al- 
though dull people are deceived by manners. A little 
man soulfully cannot be a big man no matter how 
hard he tries, any more than brass can feel itself to be 
gold. A babbling brook, however clear, active or am- 
bitious, cannot be a Niagara. We can emit no tone 
but just in correspondence to our metal. 

PHYSICAL AND MENTAL VIBRATIONS ANALOGOUS. 

The vibratory principles now discovered in physics 
are so fine that they become an anology by means of 
which we can understand those mental or cerebral 
vibrations or distinct psychic influences. The most 
prodigious physical effects are wrought by vibratory 
laws that are entirely unobservable to our senses, as 
much so as this assumed mental vibration. It is only 
imperceptible and inconceivably gentle vibrations from 
the sun that transform icy dead winter into vernal 



THE RESURRECTION. 



31 



beauty and life; and while they do not influence the 
wing of the tiniest insect, they dislodge icebergs. 
Physicists tell us that eight billions of waves are re- 
quired to produce the color of violet. Cut through a 
little telephonic wire and look at the end or along its 
surface with the most powerful microscope and it will 
not reveal the molecular motion (if there is any such 
motion) of conveying orchestral sounds or prodigious 
motor power. When we familiarize ourselves with 
the most attenuated condition of matter with the 
atomic theory, the wave philosophy of light, heat, 
sound, ether, wireless telegraphy, etc., these things 
will aid us in realizing the subtle potency of this mind 
wave. In Professor Youman's Chemistry we find the 
following facts : An ounce of gold may be divided by 
mechanical means into four hundred and thirty-two 
billion parts, each of which will contain all of the qual- 
ities of the largest mass of that metal, and can be seen. 
Platinum wire may be drawn out so fine that it would 
take two hundred and fifty strands to be as thick as a 
filament of raw silk. A spider's thread is composed of 
six thousand filaments. On a drop of musk deer's 
blood, suspended on the point of a needle, there are 
proven to be one hundred and twenty millions of discs. 
Professor Norton has divided color waves into sixty 
thousand to an inch, and their motions seven hundred 
and two trillions per second. It has been written that 
the duration of an electric spark is less than the mil- 
lionth part of a second. A galvanic battery, no larger 



32 ELECTRICITY AND 

than a lady's thimble, will telegraph under the ocean 
to another continent. The nerve fluid courses through 
wires that are too fine to be seen by the unaided eye. 
A whisper by means of flowing ether (electricity) can 
be heard a thousand miles away. Now by comparisons 
like these need we limit the distance of the brain's 
magnetic power or the susceptibility of the mind 
through etheric waves? 

''It is possible that these higher and almost infinitely 
rapid vibrations may be what are called the higher emo- 
tions of passions — such as religion, love, hate — dwelling 
in a still more subtle but yet material medium, that poets 
and churches have picturesquely termed the heart, con- 
science, soul." — ^Stimson. 

It has been proved that mental emotions will cause 
heart throbs that will jar a whole house. Then may 
not this theory of an emanative, radiating principle of 
mind upon mind explain social excitements, hypnotic 
power and domineering influences? Bonaparte said 
that he often noticed the immediate ''electrical effect'' 
of his arrival upon the battle field. It is well known in 
military campaigns that each army is imbued with the 
characteristics and spirit of its commander, whether 
he is personally present or not. The mind of the 
leader may either send out a subtle essence of its own 
or it may vibrate on the intervening ether — first upon 
his staff and immediate generals, and thence to others 
— aside from the technical transmission of verbal or- 



THE RESURRECTION. 



33 



ders, or their subjective adoption by the army. No 
man can be a social or political power who cannot 
command those nearest him. 

The civil wars of ancient Rome were the massing of 
great armies by the personal force of rival generals, 
more than the force of the law or public requirement. 

"This is the influence which men, with what I may 
term great electrical power in their nature, have ex- 
ercised in war. Caesar, Marlborough, Napoleon, Sir 
Charles Napier and many others I could name, possessed 
it largely. The current passed from them into all around, 
creating enthusiasm in all ranks far and near, and often 
making heroes of men whose mothers and fathers even 
had never regarded them in that light. This feeling is 
an addition of at least fifty per cent of strength and 
energy to an army where it exists." — Wolseley. 

Is Wolseley using facts or metaphor? Brain power 
or mental emanation is not moral or intellectual force ; 
it is a material force. In an audience it becomes an 
influence upon individual minds either to oppress or as- 
sist, to depress or elevate, something in the manner 
of barometric pressure. In the exercise of personal 
command the force imparted is not merely from legit- 
imate authority, but there goes v/ith the words of 
command, from a natural commander, a real, objective, 
material force, or fluid, that seizes upon the passive 
brain and inspires or suffuses it with the condition, 
ideas and emotions of the dominant brain, or over- 



34 ELECTRICITY AND 

comes resistance by superior kinetic power and pro- 
duces upon the object either a brain paralysis or stimu- 
luSj overcoming all its efforts of resistance, even un- 
consciously staying the hand of the secret assassin. 
Some parents corporeally punish their children because 
they have not this silent natural impressment. Some 
men govern by law and regulations, others by an un- 
seen mysterious personal prod and spur. Negative 
people are heroic only when alone ; such a man, when 
in his study may write like a statesman or a general, 
but not be able to control a corporal's guard by per- 
sonal presence and contact. Some persons when 
closely observed feel this benumbing influence, and 
cannot sign their name or execute upon a musical in- 
strument when another is looking over their shoulder. 
Passive people go to sleep in large audiences, be- 
numbed magnetically. Stage-fright is often from this 
overwhelming, magnetic, unseen counter-stream of an 
audience; but sympathy of the audience is lifting. 
Every platform entertainer can testify to feeling the 
force of his listeners for or against him as percept- 
ibly as an electric current or draught of air. Blind 
performers can feel the power of their audiences for 
or against them. Subjective and moral causes can- 
not account satisfactorily for these phenomena. This 
personal magnetism is a power greater today in the 
courts than the law, greater in the church than the 
gospel, greater in the state than the constitution, 
greater in society than money. The world is still gov- 



THE RESURRECTION. 35 

erned personally as of old. Laws would be dead let- 
ters without personal will-power infused into their ad- 
ministration. He is an unsuccessful judge who has 
not more in him than learning ; and he is an unsuccess- 
ful general who depends alone upon military authority. 
This element has been described by Emerson in the 
words ''character/' ''self-sufficiency," the "impossibil- 
ity of being displaced or upset/' "men in whom the 
largest part of their power is latent." He says further : 
"What some men effect by talent or eloquence, this 
man accomplishes by magnetism." The following re- 
mark of his covers the whole theory : 



"A river of command runs from the eyes of some men, 
and the reason why we feel one man's presence and not 
another's is as simple as gravity; and this natural force 
is no more to be withstood than any other natural force." 

Is Emerson using idle figures of speech or stating 
real phenomena? 

/ In the dynamics of nature there is practically no 
equilibrium. No two drops of water that join on a 
window-pane meet each other half way ; one takes to 
itself the other. So it is in our mental and social re- 
lations; no two human beings are to each other in 
equipoise. In every couple, group, community, assem- 

1 blage, convention, nation, one person will have the 
ascendancy, voluntarily or involuntarily. We either 



36 ELECTRICITY AND 

sway or are swayed. In our relations with society 
we are either positive or passive, and in this people 
vary in degree. Some people are constitutionally pos- 
itive and some are constitutionally passive as to their 
influence with others. This force has nothing to do 
with intellectual gifts; and it more accounts for in- 
justice and social inequalities than education, birth, 
riches or good fortune. We all have noticed an irre- 
sistible influence or power of some other person, as in 
a blustering or even a quiet stranger, an aggressive 
salesman, boss, official, or a strong-minded friend, in 
whose presence our faculties were dazed, our will sub- 
jugated, and against whose influence we have 
struggled and determined, time after time, ineffectu- 
ally. And we may have noticed the same subjection of 
some person or persons to ourselves. Who has not 
at some time in his life felt this mysterious and dis- 
agreeable thralldom, a dreaded, hated, but irresistible 
magic, and obeyed it in spite of the clear dictates of 
judgment and even pre-determination ? We have seen 
the nominal slave become the real master, the private 
soldier act as the real commander, the junior in years 
overawe the senior, the wife rule the husband. Even 
kings have, in self-disgust, silently abdicated to a 
strong-minded minister. Richelieu was said to be 
"more than king — he was Richelieu/' We have felt 
that this power comes from some copious, un- 
seen and natural fountain head; that it is not 
a mere assumption or conceit, nor the result 



THE RESURRECTION. 37 

of adventitious aids, but that it is inborn and 
V seems to come from temperament, fiber, weight, and 
f^is in mind exactly what density is in matter. Some 
men seem to have a natural specific gravity or inertia 
of soul, and the question here is as to whether we obey 
their suggestions or commands voluntarily out of re- 
spect, deference and fear, or whether our subjection to 
them is involuntarily on account of some real materio- 
mental force which they radiate and with which they 
dispel or overcome our own force as wind blows away 
smoke. 

Intermittent courage, energy or will cannot make a 
man a leader. To control men one must have a con- 
tinuo us, un affected flow of power, as a natural gift, 
even unconsciously, like the ceaseless energy of na- 
ture. A puffball cannot feel the substantiality of a 
rock. A weak-souled person cannot feel the com- 
fortable and steady mental averdupois of men who are 
never budged by personal opposition, and who seem 
o emit an influence by mere existence. 

There is a kind of man who, though not wanting 
in genius, industry, endurance and courage, who is 
efficient in any post of organization or work, but has 
no impressment upon other men as a coercive, per- 
sonal force. Another kind of man makes an impres- 
sion upon strangers, even in silence; and in a crowd, 
when he opens his mouth he is heard with deference 
and obedience. He naturally speaks and moves as 
though he expects it. He can silence a ruffian at sight, 



38 ELECTRKITY AND 

although for planning, inventive skill, interest and 
general utility he may be worth less than a passive 
man, and is found, after a trial, after his first ''bluff'' 
is over, to be a fraud, failure and humbug where good 
is to be done and physical dangers are to be encoun- 
tered. He will have an influence upon all around him 
without a word or an act, by what is somtimes called 
a "peculiar manner." When feeling weakness, men 
sometimes affect this force, but it is by others in- 
stinctively seen through, as pinchbeck. The man of 
inherent gravity will naturally fall heir to social po- 
sition, official authority, political influence and figure- 
head leadership. Other men, more intellectually 
equipped, with less egoism and selfishness, will be 
drawn to him, and in silence and obscurity they will 
do his work and earn for him his glory. 



Goethe makes this statement, which is of common 
experience : 

**One soul may have a decided influence upon others 
merely by means of this silent presence, of which I could 
relate many instances. It has often happened to me that 
when I have been walking with an acquaintance and 
have had a lively image of something in my mind he has 
at once begun to speak of that very thing. We all have 
something of an electrical and magnetic force within us, 
and we put forth, like the magnet itself, an attractive or 
repulsive power according as we come in contact with 
something similar or dissimilar." 



THE RESURRECTION. 39 

Napoleon was a monstrous power of psychic force; 
men obeyed him in his absence by the same law that 
willows bend to the storm, not voluntarily, but in- 
voluntarily; not morally, but mechanically. His in- 
fluence was not that alone of mental genius. In the 
truest test of abstract intellect he was inferior to some. 
All people about him seemed to have had inducted 
into them a mysterious power that seized upon their 
faculties and swayed them hypnotically, as an electric 
current causes pieces of paper to dance. No moral 
influence could have forced his unthinking clods into 
carnage and death. He was naturally a king, an 
autocrat. There are positive kings and negative kings ; 
the latter being constitutional, humane, benignant and 
beloved, but sometimes being ruled by other persons. 
Chieftains by nature are everywhere. 

'This invisible radiation also was strikingly mani- 
fested in Napoleon. Seeking an explanation of his con- 
trol over his marshals we find it in the statement that 

/ the grip of his hand was like unto a powerful electric 

f shock."— Dr. Dwight Hillis. 

''He (Napoleon) has ruined us, he has destroyed 
France and himself, yet I love him still; he has so much 
greatness of soul, such majesty of manner, that he be- 
witches all minds. Approach him with-a thousand preju- 
dices, you quit him filled with admiration." — Colonel 
Raoul. 

"As brave as Murat was, he was a craven in Napoleon's 
presence." — Colonel Rapp. 



40 ELECTRICITY AND 

A stranger takes a chair every day in the same 
locaHty on the deck of an ocean steamer, and although 
possessing no gifts of conversation or mind, nor parad- 
ing any attainments above the company of strangers, 
by this centraHty, self-poise, mystery of eye, and fixed- 
ness of character, he unaccountably makes that place 
the center of attraction for the voyage. Of course per- 
sons are not drawn by him with the fatality and cer- 
tainty of iron filings to a magnet ; they are intelligent 
beings, have free wills, could resist his influence and 
keep away, but are not so minded and are not con- 
scious of the benumbing process going on. On an- 
other steamer we have seen a captain command and 
discipline his ship from shore to shore without a single 
word. G. P. R. James said of de Cordoba : "He had 
that genius that convinces without argument and leads 
without persuasion.'' Universally in the army, during 
the American civil war, the best disciplined and most 
effective corps were those of the quietest commanders. 
The mere personal presence of one man in a family, 
a gang of men, a large factory, or a camp, gives order 
and system; everything proceeds according to his 
silent will ; and that man may not have an intellectual 
gift or attainment that he can rate above others. On 
the other hand, there are men of education, perception, 
courage and experience, who, though fretting them- 
selves with ''suggestion," command and entreaty, rules 
and regulations, seem to have everything about them 
at loose ends as to discipline. Steady power of will can- 



THE RESURRECTION. 



41 



not be simulated. There may be a steady moral purpose 
within one's self, enough to make a martyr, but when 
that purpose is applied to another person there needs 
to go along with it a material force, an inherent weight, 
to be effective. People who are courageous before 
physical dangers are cowed before persons because 
of this radiating life-fluid that enthralls. This force 
is one of the material forces of nature. Where it is 
lacking it must be substituted by superior moral quali- 
ties and by using steadily and cultivating what mag- 1 
netic force one has, for there is always some of it where \ 
there is life at all. There is a negative will power, 
but that does not operate upon others as a coercive in- 
fluence. Some natures are born to command, while 
others are born to plan and obey in useful lines. Of 
two business partners, one will furnish the ingenuity 
and the other the executive authority; and the em- 
ployes know by instinct exactly what those different 
qualities mean. The obedience they give to one is not 
from fear or interest, but they are driven as the wheel 
is driven by the water from the flume, or as the piston 
rod is driven by the pressure of the vapor. Daniel 
Webster's definition of a great man was : *'One whose 
children mechanically obey him when he is absent.'' 

We see a class of strong, positive, selfish, centralized 
individuals who succeed in life. They absorb energy 
from everybody about them. Most every great man 
is a hog in some way. Such men build themselves up 
from an infinitude of invisible and mysterious sources. 



42 ELECTRICITY AND 

A current of social magnetism is caused by them and 
sets in upon them. They are called the favored chil- 
dren of fortune. So a strong, selfish, egotistic person 
in a domestic circle, or in larger spheres absorbs all 
the energy and monopolizes all the attention, robbing 
the rest. That is one reason why great men's sons 
disappoint their fathers — all ' faculty and encourage- 
ment are diverted to the ''old man." 

Negative persons have no success except in hard 
work; no safety except in isolation. Passive or posi- 
tive individuals can be known at sight, both physiog- 
nomically and phrenologically ; and in that way we can 
tell persons who have a reputation among their 
acquaintances for ''luck,'' which often is a blind and 
crude name for genius. Of all the personal contests, 
tournaments and modern fisticuffs, or duels with rapier 
and pistol, the eye and stream of magnetism have made 
the muscles and will of the opponent falter. Men can 
be stared down, their weapons made to fall, and their 
aim or guard parried by this current of cold mental 
lightning from eye to eye. 

"He (Cato) had a fierce countenance and spoke to his 
enemy in a threatening and dreadful accent; for he 
rightly judged, and endeavored to convince others, that 
such a kind of behavior often strikes an adversary with 
greater terror than the sword itself." — Plutarch. 

But, probably, Cato did not simulate fierceness; it 
was in him. 



THE RESURRECTION. 43 

We have seen a fragile woman in a cage of lions; 
we see a child of six years drive a herd of cattle; a 
woman drills a platoon of elephants. There is no moral 
influence in all this; it is psychic or magnetic force. 
What morals or reasoning have brutes ? Born orators 
are born tyrants. A negative student may write a 
speech which by his recital may fall flat upon the 
multitude; but some positive, hard-headed, practical, 
sturdy man will take two or three of these expressions 
and send them through us like spears. It makes all 
the difference in the world who the man is that says 
a good thing. This kind of will power is more innate 
than cultivated; more a living original force than a 
conceit. 



*'A word or a nod from a man of superior character 
is more regarded than the long discourse of another/* — 
Plutarch. 



No matter how clear one's mind may be upon any 
question of public concern, he cannot produce effect 
nor be accepted as an adviser unless he has the electric 
force to push or induct his opinions into the conscious- 
ness of others. A man with this force and little genius 
will do more and take a higher position in public life 
than a man with genius and little force. Observe the 
towering examples of human will power and personal 
influence along through history; how inborn it has 
been. Moral and intellectual causes alone do not ac- 



44 ELECTRICITY AND 

count for this phenomenal difference in men's power of 
command where they are financially, socially, officially 
and intellectually equal. At twenty Alexander showed 
a proud will, an imperious temper, and had been all 
through his father's wars ; at twenty-one he mounted 
the throne and immediately imbued his army with a 
new power that conquered the world. The greatest 
generals and kings of the earth were dragged captive 
by this "boy general." Abbott says that he was lifted 
above national feeling, and dominion over the world 
became his master passion. Caesar at twenty-eight had 
conquered three hundred nations, taken eight hun- 
dred cities, handled three millions of soldiers and 
caused the killing of a million of men. William the 
Norman was said to be like ''a tower, a tempest, a 
thunderbolt." The historian Green says: ''Boy as he 
was, horse and man went down before his lance. He 
arose to his greatest height when the other m.en 
despaired." Napoleon at the age of twenty-seven took 
command of an army of invasion over the oldest gen- 
erals and against the oldest country and principalities 
of Europe. Whether dictating to other kings in their 
own palaces or indifferently noticing them as they 
came to the roadside as he passed, or mending his own 
coat among his staff at St. Helena, without the aid of 
hereditary rank or social caste, he was the same over- 
bearing, self-conscious, natural will power, and would 
take a prominent general by the ear as he would a boy. 
Henrv IV. . when fifteen, at the battle of Shrewsbury, 



THE RESURRECTION. 45 

was a hero; at sixteen he struck the chief justice in 
the face, and then manfully submitted to punishment 
for contempt of court ; at nineteen he conducted a cam- 
paign alone. The Duke of Alva was called a ''child 
warrior," and was always arbitrary, cold and calculat- 
ing. Cromwell was said to be a bully and a gambler 
at seventeen. Marshal Turenne, when taunted at the 
age of ten with being too feeble in constitution to be- 
come a soldier, ran away and slept a whole winter's 
night upon a cannon ; at eleven years of age he chal- 
lenged an officer to a duel. The great Conde brought 
on a battle at twenty-two, against the advice of his 
old generals ; he ahvays led his charges in person and 
charged fifteen times in one battle. General Wolfe 
was one of the most distinguished officers at the age 
of twenty-three, and w^as killed at the head of an army 
at the age of thirty-four. General Washington was 
commander of a Virginia militia at the age of twenty- 
four and had a national reputation. 

Napoleon selected agents of such psychic force 
to execute his will. Note these inborn and natural 
examples of magnetic power over other men. Auge- 
reau was said to ''tear through the ranks of the 
enemy with headlong fury"; he was a marshal of 
France at the age of twenty-four. Saint Cyr was a 
general of a division at thirty-two. Lannes was killed 
at thirty-two and Napoleon wept at it. Mortier showed 
his personal influence in his steady command of "com- 
mon time" at the retreat of Crasnoi; and McDonald 



46 ELECTRICITY AND 

showed it in holding his division where it is said "the 
round shot crashed through the serried masses hke 
the rattHng of hail." Soult said, ''soldiers who can un- 
dertake what I can are fit to be conquerors of the 
world.'' Junot was called 'The Tempest." Murat 
fought six duels before he was twenty-two. He was 
commander of an army before he was thirty-two. 
Headley says of him : "Mounted he was a magnificent 
spectacle, plunging single-handed like a thunderbolt 
into the ranks of the enemy." Messena was called 
"the favorite child of victory;" and Napoleon said of 
him, "You alone are equivalent to six thousand men." 
Victor was called "The Terrible." He was general of 
a division at twenty-nine. Oudinot "made his sol- 
diers stand like a wall of iron." Napoleon said of Bes- 
sierres, "A slight wound of him would give the whole 
army the lockjaw." Suchet received six sabre 
wounds in one battle. Ney was the hero of five hun- 
dred battles, and at Waterloo five horses were shot 
from under him. Our own Commodore Perry built, 
equipped and fought a fleet to victory at the age of 
twenty-eight. All of these examples of leadership are 
not from superior courage or intellectual ability, but 
from personal influence. 

What is this power that some men have over others ? 
Is it the faculty of ready obedience in the race where 
it recognizes power and superiority? "Suggestive" 
hypnotism does not seem to account for the vastness 
and universality of the influence. Why such a dif- 



THE RESURRECTION. 47 

ference in the personal influence of men with appar- 
ently the same physiological structure and opportuni- 
ties ? As by some unknown law of natural forces there 
is concentrated, perhaps by the lightning's flash or the 
more gradual processes of pressure, pure carbon in 
the diamond, so by some spiritual convulsion there are 
concentrated or stored, to a phenomenal degree in 
human beings, gems of spiritual carbon to shine out 
in the genuine wealth of genius and power through 
some individuality. No mere physiology or heredity 
can explain these sudden exaggerations of humanity. 

"Now in the name of all the gods at once, 

Upon what meat doth this our Caesar feed 

That he is grown so great?" 

— Shakespeare. 

Some men seem to be born into the middle of great 
affairs and to take them naturally; never boys, but 
always men. William Pitt is the most fascinating civil 
example of this class. Macaulay says of him, ''He was 
a distinguished member of the House of Commons 
at the age of twenty-one. In the midst of such tri- 
umphs as parliamentary leader, he completed his twen- 
ty-fifth year. He domineered absolutely over the 
cabinet, and was the favorite at once of the sovereign, 
of the parliament and of the nation. He had a high, 
intrepid nature, was incapable of low vices, fear or 
envy, and was proudly conscious of his own rectitude 
and intellectual superiority.'' 



48 ELECTRICITY AND 

This precocity and naturalness of personal influence 
has been characteristic of all the world's great premiers 
and statesmen. Mirabeau was ''precocious, impetuous, 
dignified, and magnetic in oratory and love." It has 
been said of Alexander Hamilton that he ''never was 
a boy in character." He came to America at the age 
of fifteen, without acquaintance or station, but such 
was his genius, self-confidence and force that he at 
once entered the best of society and positions of em- 
ployment. At nineteen he was a leading artillery of- 
ficer, at twenty a revolutionary officer, orator, aid-de- 
camp and confidential friend of Washington. He 
would not brook any hard exercise of even Washing- 
ton's personality; and when there was a rupture be- 
tween them, when Hamilton was twenty-one, he sug- 
gested that it should be concealed from the army, as 
it might weaken the revolutionary cause. J. C. Breck- 
enridge said of Henry Clay, "He never acknowledged 
a superior." Lord Give was a poor clerk in the East 
India Company, and in his 'teens displayed a fiery and 
unmanageable temper. At twenty-five he had acquired 
a great reputation for desperate courage, fertility of 
resources and command, and soon afterwards success- 
fully defeated a garrison with five hundred men against 
ten thousand Turks and East Indians. Such are ex- 
amples of direct personal influence and leadership by 
men of action. 

Peter the Great and Colonel Aaron Burr may be 
recalled as examples of psychic force and volume. 



THE RESURRECTION 



49 



And the old Roman emperors and generals, who 
gained their ascendency by personal prowess among 
a race of semi-barbarians who were not amenable to 
religion or a fine moral sense^ driving those armed 
hordes on to their death, could have had such power 
only by personal magnetic hypnotism. 

But there are men of ideas and "suggestion'' who 
have no hypnotic influence, but who extend the sug- 
gestive effect of their intellects throughout genera- 
tions ; they are not illustrations of this personal and 
contemporary swaying power. An inventor, a poet, a 
philosopher, a scientist, may by his works benefit man- 
kind through the whole course of time and may be 
called great, yet be of a timid, diffident and embar- 
rassed disposition. Two men of equal literary power 
and posthumous influence may be opposites in contem- 
porary or personal influence. Gifts, industry, self- 
sacrifice, ambition, energy and endurance, imagination 
and art may exist and have their influence without sel- 
fish domination, and they will produce fame. Observe 
the two companions, Sam Johnson and Oliver Gold- 
smith. Johnson was violent, leonine, and was called 
the ''Giant of English literature" (gigantic egotism). 
His biographer says, "His passions were irritable; he 
had a fierce independent spirit, a dictatorial manner, 
and forced his meaning by a loud voice. In literary en- 
counters, when the contention was for personal 
superiority, he would come out into actual ferocity." 



50 . ELECTRICITY AND 

Garrick says, "He was tremendous." On the other 
hand, Goldsmith, his companion, was passive, sensitive 
and timid. He was the butt of Johnson's jokes, al- 
though Johnson loved him. Irving sums up his char- 
acter by calHng him, 'Toor Goldsmith." Our own 
Thomas Jeflferson at the age of thirty-two had become 
the founder of one of the greatest political parties in 
the history of the world and had cast the character of 
a great nation. ^ He became a voluminous author, re- 
nowned for his works; and yet we are told, "he was 
shy, reserved and sensitive, and never sought to im- 
press his personality upon others." Ruskin has been 
called "childlike." Hans Christian Andersen was 
"embarrassed in manner and displayed an amount of 
childlike simplicity that was very annoying to his 
friends." It was said that Bryant was "amiable, re- 
served and simple, even to shyness." And Longfellow 
was said to be "averse by temperament to anything 
that was harsh and repellant." Adam Smith was "art- 
less, simple and sensitive." Joaquin Miller has told us 
that Tennyson is "shy and retiring." We have been 
told that the inventor, Erricson, was "too diffident to 
live." We see that some of the world's greatest bene- 
factors have been destitute of personal force and con- 
temporary influence. Their "suggestive" hypnotism 
was not apparent. Pitt, whom we have cited before, at 
the age of twenty-five, was the master of parliament, 
but Christopher Wren, the great architect, and also a 



THE RESURRECTION. 



51 



member of parliament, describes himself as ^'a blushing 
youth of twenty-five/' 

We find this personal magnetism among driving, 
harsh, successful men ; we see it predominant in money 
marts and in political leaders. Men having this power 
are prompt, quick and executive. They have a natural 
impressiveness ; they drive rough-shod over the sen- 
sibilities of others and care little for details. They are 
strong in temperament, connected and practical in 
mental operation, without sympathy and tenderness; 
are healthy, ambitious and often selfish and avaricious. 
They naturally take to public life ; authority sits easily 
upon them. They are bosses without effort ; they make 
good salesmen and drummers ; they are good military 
leaders when they have the moral courage — for physi- 
cal courage cannot face a cannon ball any more than it 
can face a locomotive in full speed. They are born 
governors, fit for feudalism. They are active and ag- 
gressive in all their manners ; they run risks and have 
ordained that cast-iron character and method in busi- 
ness; they seldom swerve in purpose or wilt under 
personal oppression. They can stand pressure; they 
can say NO. When such a man is not guided by 
moral principle, give him no opportunity, repose no 
faith in him; do not trust yourself in his influence; 
fight his magnetism with your own, and fence him in 
with every device or cunning as you would a wild 
beast. Such men dread and respect moral qualities in 
others. All contact with these positive, selfish tem- 



'^^. 



52 ELECTRICITY AND 

peraments is sure to leave a blister of some kind. An 
iron pot and delf pot floating down a torrent, the latter 
politely declined the former's company. 

The passive man is simply lacking in this one ele- 
ment of magnetic aggressiveness. He may have all 
other faculties — ambition, energy, genius, motive, 
"suggestion" and even courage in high degree ; but he 
is soft, and when opposed is limber. He may have a 
good mind and social position, yet be without influence. 
He is retired, sympathetic and kindly ; propriety is al- 
ways his bugaboo, and it destroys his usefulness. It is 
he who writes the briefs in office, while the positive 
man uses them at the bar. He invents in the shop 
while the positive man is the promoter, raises the stock 
companies and makes the money; he is the author, 
while the positive man is the publisher; he does the 
world much good, while the other likely does harm ; he 
is the man of thought, the other is the man of action ; 
he shrinks from contest and yet often is a willing 
martyr; the positive man courts conflict, hut selfishly 
stops short of martyrdom ; the passive or negative man 
has a thousand clear plans that are never heard of, 
while the other often blunders ahead at random and 
makes good strokes by impulse and by the instinct of 
promptitude and high courage. The passive man is 
never happy without approval, while the positive man 
''goes it alone.'' Clothed with power the passive man 
is uneasy and rules by principle and law, not by per- 
sonal will; his shyness and refinement make others 



THE RESURRECTION, 



53 



think that he is aristocratic, while at heart he is a true 
democrat; but the positive man by his rough manner 
wears a mask of complaisance and equality over silent 
tyranny. We love the negative man; we fear the 
positive man. The passive man gives good work for 
his pay, while the other gets good pay for his work. 
The passive person is the slave, the positive person 
the master. The positive man is always oppulent in 
his impudence ; all he wants is men or women to work 
upon, then his fortune is made. He seeks society and 
prominence for the pleasure of exercising his power, 
as wrestlers do the arena; the negative man avoids 
the crowd. The passive man is the altruist ; the posi- 
tive man is the egotist. Negative people adapt them- 
selves to society in accordance with taste and fitness. 
Positive people chronically force themselves into no- 
tice and take part without regard to their adaptation. 
Negative people are generally doing for others and 
scattering blessings; positive people are generally 
absorbing them. The positive man is born great; the 
negative man achieves greatness. The positive man 
has self-poise; and this is what men admire, in- 
stinctively follow, gather about and flunkey to more 
than to any other quality. Moral influences may ac- 
cou»t in some degree for this centripetal tendency, but 
mechanical or material attraction will account for it 
better. The weight of character which stands un- 
moved or which goes like an iron ship, directly, and 
cannot be moved off, is doubtless allied to a material 



54 ELECTRICITY AND 

density or something in the soul resembHng specific 
gravity in matter. Two lads may start off in the 
morning of life together, equal in fortune, education 
and opportunity. A will have an active, subtle intel- 
lect, health, ambition, and will excel and distance B 
in study, degree and every quality of intellect and in- 
dustry. But when they become men in business, or 
in political rivalry, B will easily push away what lies 
across his path, will gradually gather about him toadies 
who are enchanted with his ''iron keel," and conceit, 
and he will become a success, with other men about 
him to do the work. Of all things, men despise nim- 
bleness and gush, no matter how useful. Men like to 
be commanded as women like flattery, or as animals 
like to be scratched. Human beings, like brutes, love 
to submit to control. He who governs by force is suc- 
cessful, but he who tries to govern by reason alone has 
a sickly time. Silent men are more influential be- 
cause of conscious power. Without this natural 
gravity there can be no success in politics. A great 
politician or statesman will magnetically draw from 
near and far, like the loadstone, the support of indi- 
viduals who have never seen him, almost like a divinity, 
as the sun silently calls back to it from distant spaces 
the nebular mist and the meteors. 



"He (President Cleveland) revealed himself within the 
short space of two years as a man of extraordinary per- 
sonal force, the quality of which is a puzzling mystery, 



THE RESURRECTION. 55 

which men of intellectual power seem to find a fascina- 
tion in trying to analyze, .... which has made 
him able to hold the politicians of his party in the hollow 
of his hand, defy conventionalities and machines alike, 
and, above all, to gain the confidence of the American 
people." — Clipping. 



There is no ''puzzling mystery'' about this when we 
know that niind is a magnetic force, and that soul is 
an ethereal substance. It is no more puzzling than 
that Sandow lifts more than Tom Thumb does. The 
true man or woman shines out involuntarily as a magic 
power over all environments, across the lines of race, 
color, creed, title, station, sex; even across all super- 
stitions, traditions and caste. 

What gave the explorer Stanley control, single- 
handed, over men civilized and savage, for months 
within a forest world, without help from the law, 
without family name or rank, without wealth or sta- 
tion, without scholarship, born and raised in poverty 
and discouragement, when those followers could have 
said nay to his commands at any instant? His soul 
was tempered with steel, as Doctor Storrs said of the 
old sultans. Stanley alone pushed a thousand follow- 
ers, on, on, on, through weariness, sickness, disease, 
vexation, despair, to death or to success. There were 
with him men as courageous as he, as ambitious as he, 
as strong physically as he, and with more education 
and adventitious aids than he, but none had his ma- 
terial fibre and d ensity of soul, v^ 



56 ELECTRICITY AND 

The will or volition is an abstract thought or opera- 
tion of mind, but the power that the will can exert is 
a quality of material reality. This positive force is 
simply personal strength and selfishness ; it is accom- 
panied by a continually aggressive will and a chronic 
condition of attack and defence. All the food which 
such a man eats is transmuted into egoism. The 
negative man may have this to a spasmodic degree 
when summoned by resolution or motive, but with 
him it is only intermittent; while with the positive 
man it is nature itself and as unvolitionally continu- 
ous as the flow of a river. The man or woman who 
has this power, and knows it, united with intelligence, 
address and experience, can make good all the old 
concept of magic and witchcraft. This self-asserting 
personality still stalks abroad as it did in ruder days 
of political power when there was little law ; but now 
it acts with silent, diplomatic and insidious power. In 
the progress of knowledge and civil rule we have made 
laws to protect property, life and limb, to punish as- 
sault and battery and breaches of the peace, and have 
ordained constitutions to snub strong minded chief- 
tains ; but what shall protect us from mysterious and 
personally magnetic kings, barons, despots and high- 
waymen who, unknown to us, rob us not only of 
energy, but of our rightful position in business and 
society? 



THE RESURRECTION. 57 



CHAPTER III. 

ETHERIC LIFE. 

Origin of matter — Ether primal — Soul defined — Material- 
ism, idealism and animism — Energy and God — Sex in matter 
— Spirit form — Intellect in the ether, not in cerebral action — 
God in the atom — Soul and body not synchronous — Antoin- 
ette Brown Blackwell and Edgar A. Poe as pioneers of a 
logical resurrection. 

Let US repeat here our definition of the soul. The 
chemistry of the body gathers like an electric dynamo 
and supports in the physical atom — germ, molecule, 
protoplasm or apparent foetus — from its beginning 
in the coitional spark, a subtile essence which is 
ethereal and similar to, if not identical with, the nerve 
fluid, or electricity, which in its nature is sentient and 
which, by reason of being elemental, ultimate and 
indecomposable maintains its identity and immortality 
by the joined qualities of volition and material per- 
sistence, and growing with the physical foetus to the 
fully developed soul. 

The soul is a separation and continuation of the con- 
scious ether from that portion of the cosmic Godly 
mass that is contained in the parents, and to which is 



58 ELECTRICITY AND 

accreted more conscious ether during gestation and 
bodily growth. This etheric soul inherits conscious- 
ness and knowledge, and afterv/ard impressions are 
made upon it from without, forming the full ego or 
experience of the matured soul. 

"The human soul is substance, simple, indivisible, 
immaterial, spiritual, having subsistence and life be- 
yond." — T. J. Hecker. 

This is easy to understand of a full-grown soul, but 
where and what was the soul in its beginning? It is 
probable that Mr. Hecker uses the word ''immateriar' 
in its old-fashioned sense. How can substance he 
immaterial ? If the soul be a substance it is related to 
all the other substances in nature and is a subject of 
science. 

It has been said that man is a three-fold entity — 
body, soul, and spirit. We will discard the term spirit, 
and consider man as a dual entity — body and soul, 
deeming all spiritual qualities to be in and of the soul. 
We may substitute the word mind for spirit. Mind is 
of soul. Soul and body may separate, but mind and 
soul never. Soul is the etheric body of the mind. 
Mind is consciousness, memory, will and emotion. 
They are not matter or etheric, but they are the accom- 
paniments of ether. The etheric soul carries con- 
sciousness with it the same as the animal body carries 



THE RESURRECTION, 59 

them both. Soul and mind are inseparable, the same 
as matter and its energy are. We will treat here soul 
and spirit as synonymous. 

To regard ourselves as body and soul in the sense 
j of two different entities gives the soul a complete 
mastery over body, and relieves us of the helplessness 
of materialism and fatalism that comes from the con- 
ception that body makes mind, or that mental phe- 
nomena are only from the machinery of the body, or 
the molecular composition and motion of the brain. 
Our clear enlightenment upon the concrete fact that 
evil does not spring from the soul, but does from the 
body makes us strong of will and virtue, because the 
mystery of passion's origin is cleared up and we know 
our strength. This is freedom's key to the weary, 
waiting prisoner. This truth makes us kings and 
queens. It is easy of practice and its effect is magical. 
f We cannot live above the brute until we acknowledge 
the soul to be an independent being. 

MATERIALISM. 

/ There is nothing more fatal to moral progress or 

I self-regeneration than the doctrine of materialism — 

\ the mind as a result of the body. Submission to it 

I strikes instantly dead the moral system of free will 

\ and responsibility that holds society from the savagery 

' of a tropical jungle, destroys genuine self-respect, dig- 

, nity of human character, and makes man only a higher 



6o ELECTRICITY AND 

brute — a trick pig, a helpless prey of vicious environ- 
ments and inward temptations. But the revelation that 
the soul and body are separate individualities sets up 
in every one's heart a court of conscience between body 
and soul where the crier calls out, ''Which of the two?" 
All sin comes from the body, nearly or remotely, even 
the lower egoistic impulses, like envy, covetuousness, 
revenge, pride, greed, etc., aside from the animal ap- 
petites. In these the soul, disembodied, has no part. 
Under the control of the materialistic doctrine there 
can be no aspiration to holiness with its peace and 
comfort, but down, down, down we go until finally 
consumed in our own rot. A person's belief in a 
separate soul-corporeity at once disengages his will 
from the supposition of bodily influence, lifts his soul 
upon its feet, gives it a new and intelligent advantage, 
and drags him out of the dregs of planetary condition. 

MIND AND SOUL SYNONYMOUS. 

Mind, too, if understood as synonymous with soul, 
is matter. Mind is usually understood to be that part 
of man that is not the body. But mentality is not mat- 
ter nor can it be conceived to be. That is to say, the 
operations of the soul are not matter any more than 
motion is a part of a machine. Consciousness, reason- 
ing, emotions, and impulses are not matter, but they 
are results of or connected with matter as attraction is 
connected with matter. This consciousness is con- 



y 



V 



THE RESURRECTION. 6l 

nected with the ethereal soul as energy is connected 
with matter, as cold is connected with snow, as fra- 
grance is connected with the flower. So, in one sense, 
gravitation and matter are one, because they are in- 
separable; and rose and fragrance are one, snow and 
cold are one, sugar and sweetness are one, the mind 
and soul-ether are one. So mind and spirit may be 
embraced under the term soul. The mind has a soul- 
body within the physical body. Sentient personal 
mind, or the ego, is the experience of the soul, and 
the soul originally is like a blank sheet of paper, with 
experiences written upon it. We all have the same 
essence of soul, but different experiences, in accord- 
ance with our own perceptions, antecedents and en- 
vironments. A soul born upon Mars would have a 
different mind from a soul born here. Mind is the 
enlightenment of the soul — what the soul has per- 
ceived, either during its planetary career, or before, or 
both together. 

IDEALISM. 

But this stumbling block of how consciousness can 
he allied to matter, as we commonly understand matter 
to be, is always in the way. That mystery drives us 
toward idealism, which seems to be the only com- 
pletely logical solution, although such logic is against 
universal experience, instinct and belief. While we do 
not intend to proceed upon the Berkleyian theory that 
all matter is a dream, we are forced to admit that a 



62 ELECTRICITY AND 

wholly dream-universe seems to be as good as a real 
universe. A good dream is as good as life; but we 
know dreams are not real, because some of them are 
illogical, unnatural and like the hallucinations of dis- 
ease. By assuming that we see are the parts of one 
systematized imagination of the Almighty, we are re- 
lieved of the unsolvable problem of the nexus between 
mind and matter. One cosmic mind, inventing all the 
infinity of other minds, with their successive experi- 
ences, all matching each other, generation after genera- 
tion does away with all materialism and all mystery. 
This idealism would do away with the differentiation 
of objectives and bring us all under the sphere of God's 
subjectives, parts of God's mind. 

But we prefer to go on with the old belief in both 
matter and mind as separate abstractions. Matter can- 
not be a condition of or fancy of mind, because of all 
these different objectives that we see, all the typog- 
raphy in the lexicons before us, all the sciences made 
by people before us — sciences which will be studied 
by people ages after us who have no connection with 
us and shall never know we even existed, but all seeing 
them as we do — could not match in such system and 
similitude unless connected by one natural system, or 
law of God's subjective dreams. Idealism would be 
fatalism also, and destroy all free agency and moral 
accountability. 

Some philosophers insist that we cannot prove the 
existence of matter, because our senses and minds 



THE RESURRECTION. 6^ 

make mistakes about it ; that we are always the uncer- 
tain subjects of illusions without and delusions within. 
But there is no more reason for denying the real and 
separate existence of matter because the five senses 
do not demonstrate its existence, than there is because 
any one sense is not certain about it. Although our 
sense of feeling, hearing, seeing, tasting and smelling 
are conditions in and of the mind only, yet they cor- 
respond to really existing outward things, respectively, 
that awaken them. When those internal impressions 
of the mind are present it would not be logical to say 
that there is nothing external that produces those 
corresponding impressions through the senses, any 
more than itVould be for a blind man to say that there 
is no post before him because he does not see it. If 
he should run his nose against it then he would testify 
as to its existence. But if a man should run against 
it who was deprived of the sense of feeling, seeing, 
hearing, smelling and tasting, that is to say, a sense- 
less man, he, also, would deny the existence of the 
post, as well as of everything else in the physical uni- 
verse. He would be dead to the universe, except as 
he might live on hereditary impressions. 

But let us carry out concurrence and coincidence as 
an argument for the objective existence of matter. 
This world has had billions of human beings through 
thousands of years, almost every one of whom has been 
a mere accident of birth and existence as regards the 
others; and yet a physical and objective fact once 



64 ELECTRICITY AND 

established in the mind of one stands forever in his- 
tory and science, to be seen independently and suc- 
cessively alike by each one of all these people. . Each 
separate physical object, such as the location of a 
letter in a printed word in a library of a million vol- 
umes, is concurred in as an objective fact by billions of 
people through all generations. The Almighty could 
construct such a concurrent system of delusions, as 
well as create the real things, but then the great ques- 
tion arises, Why should we be deluded? Why does 
this stupendous system of illusions seem to us irre- 
concilable with what we have commonly thought and 
believed about it? 

I am walking alone on the sea beach. As far as I 
can see, everything is solitude. I find a wave-cast 
trunk and open it. I see it full of presents for some 
loved heart. There are hundreds of articles more 
strange and fanciful than I could ever have dreamed 
of — an India shawl with a thousand strange patterns 
and devices; beads; curiously carved tusks; manu- 
script of a romance. It may all be my dream, accord- 
ing to Berkeley. Another person comes along, born 
on the other side of the world. He sees the same 
things. Our published accounts tally, although neither 
person saw the other. Both may be dreaming; the 
very seashore may be a dream, and the ocean and the 
clouds. But we ourselves are not dreams, for we 
think and therefore we exist as separate from God. 
But why are we fooled as to everything else? Bishop 



THE RESURRECTION, 65 

Berkley may say that everybody else is a dream except 
me, and that everybody is a dream but himself. I am 
a reality for I am thinking of me, and I could not do 
that if I were not in existence as an alternative entity 
from everything else. But I have no more privileges 
than anybody else, so if we all are objective realities, 
then matter may be also an objective reality. 

We are told by scientists that the redness of the 
apple is in the mind only. Why not tell us that the 
roundness of the apple is in the mind only? There is 
something in the apple that makes the redness in the 
mind, and we see that thing which makes the redness, 
so how do we know that thing is not really red? It 
would be red if we did not see it; it would be red if 
there were no eyes at all in the world to see it. If 
God made vegetation before humanity do we suppose 
that vegetation was without color? A red apple is 
red in the dark, although w^e cannot see it. It would 
be round in the dark though we had no hand to feel it. 
Scientists tell us some very funny things. Some of 
them tell us we cannot prove there is matter. We an- 
swer neither can they prove all the world has been 
humbugged. We used to say, with Dominie Jasper, 
"The sun do move,'' until they proved that it did not. 
Now let them prove there is no matter ; and let them 
prove there is no soul before they pooh-pooh. 

So we shall proceed according to common human 
instinct and belief, because they are rational enough 



66 ELECTRICITY AND 

for our present purpose, and we shall assume the ex- 
istence of both mind and matter. 

THE SOUL OF THE WORLD. 

The postulate that God and our souls are not 
material and are separate from matter, would 
leave matter dead, inert, and a surplusage in the 
universe that shall at a future time, when the 
mind and God are through with it, be left a 
waste. God does not waste. If matter should be- 
come a surplusage, where would it be stored? It can- 
not be annihilated. Shall it lie off on one side in some 
cosmic lumber room, abandoned, while mind is off 
somewhere else enjoying itself? In that view there 
never would have been any use at all for matter and 
Idealism would be far more reasonable. There is a 
half formed idea that in the spiritual world there will 
be only a sentient existence, without corporeality, 
''when the elements shall melt with fervent heat and 
the heavens shall roll away like a scroll.'' Whither 
shall the scroll roll to under this ideal doctrine of God 
and soul? The rolling away of the scroll is only the 
dissolution of all physical matter into the unphysical ' 
but still material ether, linking matter and mind there 
forever as they are linked here. Is there any reason 
why mind and matter should be only temporarily as- 
sociated ? Why discontinuity ? Why a change ? The two 
work together very well here ; why can they not do so 



THE RESURRECTION. 6; 

there ? It is more rational to assume mind and matter to 
be one, as matter and its energy are, without enquiring 
the why and wherefore. All this physical universe is a 
condensation, or crystallization, of a part of God's 
ethereal body, and it will melt back into Him as ice does 
into water, or as crystals dissolve back into solution, ex- 
cept the etheric whirlpool of our individualities which 
keep on by our own will and our created reflex power. 
God could sjtop this whirlpool at any time, but he will 
not so long as we are good. 

THE NEXUS. 

Let us try to see more closely the connection be- 
tween mind and matter. Mind is resident in and of 
ethereal matter as blue is in and of indigo, as crystals 
are resident in and of salt, as granules are in and of 
iron, as sweetness is in and of sugar, as energy is in and 
of the atom. There cannot be any indigo without 
the blue. There can be no salt without crystals, no 
iron without granules, no sugar without sweetness, no 
matter without mind. There can be no clam without a 
shell; and the clam is not the shell, although they 
were made together; they are both the clam. So 
mentality and ethereality are not alike, but they are 
united as one and they cannot be disunited any more 
than hydrogen and water can. Essentially ice is 
water and water is ice; matter is cohesion and co- 
hesion is matter. There can be no cohesion without 



68 ELECTRICITY AND 

matter and no matter without cohesion ; and so there 
can be no ether without mind and no mind without 
ether, although we cannot understand the wherefore in 
ether phenomenon. We do' not know which is first, co- 
hesion or matter, fragrance or the rose, mind or ether ; 
but we do know they were created together and will 
always exist together. We also believe that soul is 
matter because we have never seen soul without mat- 
ter. Mind and ether have the same principle of in- 
separability and therefore one is the other; mind is 
ether and ether is mind. Mentality is not matter any 
more than coldness is snow, but there can be no snow 
without coldness and, in the same way, there can be 
no mentality without matter. Hatred is not matter, 
but the thing that hates is matter. Seeing and hearing 
are not matter, but to see and hear there must be some 
other thing to do the seeing and hearing. So the 
whole mental e^o is not matter except in the sense 
that it is necessarily of a thing that is matter. The non- 
material sentience may dominate matter and be of 
matter ; thus making matter move itself as, we repeat, 
the man moves himself. The ethereal soul, or atom, 
moves itself the same way as the integral man by his 
will he moves himself. 

As in our planetary life so it will be in our celestial 
life. All phenomena and all analogy show that men- 
tality and matter are connate and inseparable; that 
the soul, which is the organ of expression for the mind, 
through the body, is a material substance, and at times 



THE RESURRECTION, 69 

it may act regardless of bodily media and conditions 
and be a physical power in itself. It grows as other 
matter grows ; is enduring and persistent like all other 
elements, and preserves its identity and continuity as 
the body does. The body does not construct the soul 
any more than the leaves, twigs, boughs and trunk of 
a tree construct the vitality that is in them. Every 
autumn the leaves fall, but in the spring new ones come 
forth from that power w^hich is behind them and un- 
seen. 

We cannot see vapor, but its force will tear iron asun- 
der. So the mind in man is a material power, even if 
not seen with physical eyes. Our eyes are poor things ; 
they are like the horn or parchment windows of the 
ancients. The ponderous and visible melon, the frag- 
ile orchid, the substantial grain do not make them- 
selves — do not call themselves forth from the self- 
same pot of earth — but there is something else, the 
dynamism of the seed, that selects from nature's 
elements and fabricates them. 

*The search for the essence, nature and origin of life 
has thus far been an absolute failure. We are apparently 
further away now than we have been at any previous 
time within the last twenty years. We may discover 
these forces; biologists hope that it will be done, but at 
the present time we are utterly unable even to theorize 
as to the origin and the source of life." — Prof. Conn. 

We shall never be able to discover ''these forces'' by 
physical means, because we cannot see life; it eludes 



70 ELECTRICITY AND 

the crucible and the retort. Scientists shall be forced 
to acknowledge the immediate presence of God per se 
in every atom and protoplasm and cell. That is the 
only force in the cell or in the atom. God's spirit is 
the soul of chemistry and of biology. No mere scien- 
tific chemistry will discover life otherwise than by 
enlightened inference ; its discovery is only by the eye 
of moral balance, of spiritual development that can 
intuitively see an axiom and that can clear away mate- 
rialistic rubbish for the self-evident truth that God is 
everywhere. 

THE ORIGIN OF CELL LIFE IS GOD. 

His contact with the gauze surface of the barren 
earth produces organic life there. 

Force of will curing bodily disorders shows the dom- 
inating physical power of will. If mind were only the 
result of bodily mechanism, a diseased body or brain 
would inevitably make a diseased mind and will, and 
the mind could never react upon the body any more 
than motion could react upon the machine. If im- 
agination creates or mollifies bodily disorders then 
imagination is a force superior to and independent of 
the body or the brain. Until we can understand the 
attraction and cohesion of matter we need not cavil 
about the mentality in and of matter. One is as in- 
scrutable as the other. We cannot have any concep- 
tion of force but as coming from intelligence. The 



THE RESURRECTION. 71 

awe-inspiring silent magnet that like a sullen giant lifts 
three tons and that could crush a man's bones or tear 
him asunder, impresses us naturally as being of life 
and volition. We know God is there. Iron alone can- 
not do this. Will power there should be no more mys- 
terious to us than when manifested in flesh and blood. 
What is the difference between the power of a magnet 
and the clutch of a man in sleep? 



THE soul's substance. 



The ancients characterized the substance of the soul 
by the term ''breath/' implying its subtility but not de- 
nying its substantial nature. If the science of the 
ether, electricity, magnetism or nerve fluid had been 
understood then, very likely one of those terms would 
have been given to it. With the inspired writers the 
belief in corporeal angels and spirits was more con- 
crete than ours. But mankind to-day has no settled 
and general belief in the substance of the soul, its 
form, its essence and qualities ; and theologians are 
wasting their breath in preaching only a metaphysical 
conjecture as a soul, which the world, in its intense 
materialism, cares not to discuss. 

''Our doctrines teach us clearly and explicitly that 
spirit is a substance and must necessarily have form. 
We must admit this or deny the existence of spirit al- 
together." — Giles. 



^2 ELECTRICITY AND 

The thought that the soul has its place among mat- 
ter-of-fact things, is rapidly crystallizing, and if this 
powerful and sentient part of man live after bodily 
death and if it be a real organism discrete from the 
body, its laws and workings in this life are a most 
practical and interesting subject for study. We have 
not proved the direct impingement of the soul upon un- 
organized or physical matter, unless it be as the mod- 
ern spiritualists claim. If we say to a stone ''move" 
and the stone do^^not move, that is not a proof that the 
soul is not matter or that the will has not a direct and 
material contact with the stone. The stone has no 
organs for the will to catch hold of; the stone is not 
designed for self-moving. The will moves the arm, 
and the arm is matter although we do not understand 
the law or method of contact between the arm and th6 
will. We have not proved that a vast concourse of ^ 
people, uniting their wills upon the slightest bit of 
down before them, could move it, or could influence 
the tiniest plant ; and yet the will moves a ponderous 
fleshly body, through organs designed for that purpose. 
But in atomic and molecular energy there is motion, 
and nobody can deny that that motion is from an in- 
telligent will. We have not a single proof that there 
is not sentience in the stone although it be not of the 
stone. The growth of flowers and fruits all about us 
has the same intelligence behind them as in the building 
of a palace. 



THE RESURRECTION, 73 

"God is able of these stones to raise up children unto 
Abraham." — Mathew iii: 9. 



"Some animal but not all becomes vegetable; some 
vegetable but not all becomes human; some human but 
not all becomes divine." — Drummond. 

"Sedimentary rock, some believe, is of vegetable 
origin." — Ross Raymond. 

"The conception of matter as dead, or inert, belongs 
to an order of thought that modern knowledge has en- 
tirely outgrown. What we shall call the material uni- 
verse is simply an imperfect picture in our minds of a 
real universe of mind stufif." — Prof. John Fiske. 

"The most powerful microscope will not discover the 
line between the animal and the vegetable kingdoms." — 
Prof. John Mickleboogh. 



"In matter there is promise of every form of terres- 
trial life."— Tyndal. 



Nowhere has a dividing line been placed between 
the different appearances of nature. First God and 
His spirit; then the earth; then vegetation; then 
animals; then man; then soul. Ovid's brilliant ''Met- 
amorphosis" illustrates this continual round of changes, 
reformations and re-incarnations of all things. 



"And matter, whatever it is, must be held to be so 
adorned, furnished and formed that all virtue, essence, 



74 ELECTRICITY AND 

action and natural motion may be the natural conse- 
quence and emanation thereof." — Lord Bacon. 



"Nature is a living organism; there is an ideal in the 
real, a subject within the object, reason within matter. 
There is a soul in the world. All is pervaded by a law 
of golar forces." — Shelling. 



All is related, mind, matter and morals. All is con- 
tinuous, here and hereafter; all is "one stupendous 
whole." Morals are as much of the material universe 
as cyclones are. The ethereal cause that produces or 
accompanies a smile is as material as a stream of water 
that turns a mill wheel, or as the vapor that moves 
the engine. Whatever sudden passion swells the 
frame, whatever of will power drives man over ob- 
stacles, is attended b.y ethereal changes. There is 
probably a psychic ego along with the centre of at- 
traction, the centre of motion and polarity in every 
separate particle of matter. 



"Every body, large or small, has its ego, and this 
whether it be organic or inorganic. If the universe is 
an organic whole, there must be an all-comprehensible 
ego. Matter, energy and intelligence are indestructible; 
these are the three great manifestations of nature. These 
three great truths explain and supplement each other. 
Give each its due weight in your philosophy and you 
will avoid the extreme of idealism on the one side and 
of materialism on the other." — (New Chemistry) J. P. 
Cooke. 



THE RESURRECTION, 75 

"Soul belongs alike to animals, vegetables and min- 
erals." — Spinoza. 



SEX IN MATTER. 

God, having set in motion the ether to form atoms, 
seems to have endowed them with the self-working 
energy of sexual relations. The molecule is the first 
of life's organisms resulting from the fusion of positive 
and negative atoms. ''Male and female created He 
them." Each atom has an inchoate sex principle. The 
molecule is full-sexed organism. The contact of two 
different sexes produces a third quality. The 
love of man and woman produces a new and better 
being, gives us a new life, creates new emotions and 
awakens new faculties. So the sexual fusion of atoms 
and their cohesive energy produced from the sexual^ 
law results in all the evolution and phenomena of the 
visible universe. All nature, the inorganic as well as 
the organic, is moving with the sexual energy. All 
its impulses are automatic and irresistible; they are 
the hand of God. The sexual principle needs no cul- 
tivation, no art, no volition in normal use. Abnormal 
and cultivated use is disease and decay. 

''Mr. Mason Kinne declared that he had discovered 
sexuality in atoms — that is, after examining the smallest 
fragments of inorganic matter, iron and other mineral 
substances, he had discovered certain traces that led him 
to believe that all atoms, animal and vegetable, are 



j(y ELECTRICITY AND 

either male or female, and reproduce their species." — 
San Francisco Call. 

Faraday remarks: "Another assumption is that 
there are two electrical fluids, each particle of each re- 
pelling all parts like itself and attracting all particles 
of the other kind, always." Perhaps in place of the 
word particles should be used the word quantity, or 
portion. A particle would be an atom. 

Sexuality is not characteristic of the animal and the 
vegetable kingdoms only. The whole world of matter 
coheres and progresses under the sexual law. The law 
of polarization and sexual difference applies to all 
things. Also a positive and negative character ap- 
plies to one and to the other. Is this sexual cohesion 
in common matter sentient? Is it the will of God 
working in matter? Can there be a remote relation 
here of the will of man over inert, separate, inorganic 
matter without physical contact? 



*The experiments of Medelejeff, Newland and Meyer 
seem to show that, in the ultimate analysis, all our so- 
called elements are compounds, and all matter is re- 
ducible to two forms of atoms/' — New York World. 



The principle of the two antithetical classes applies 
to every material, mental, social and religious con- 
dition. There are everywhere the strong and the weak, 
the positive and the negative. The same principle in 
society makes the progressive and the conservative, 



THE RESURRECTION. yy 

the tory and the whig, the lawless and the dutiful, 
the aggressive and the passive, the noisy and the 
silent. 

THE LOCATION OF SPIRIT. 

The very conception of a spiritual ego implies its 
substance of some sort. We cannot conceive of an ego 
of intelligence without segregation and location of 
some kind. The consciousness of the ego is a con- 
sciousness of itself. The "itself implies isolation, and 
is a term used to imply an alternative of something 
else that is some where else. We cannot predicate loca- 
tion in space but of stibstance. Your mind is in your 
body, not out -of it. So if the mind must have location, 
why may it not have all the other substantial qualities ? 
People have said that they can shut their eyes and im- 
agine themselves to be in space without any physical 
conditions. But it is noticed that they say "space." 
When asked to imagine themselves to be without lo- 
cality, direction or somewhere, a here or there, they 
cannot perform that mental feat. * 

''No mental image or a purely spiritual ideal world 
can be formed. . . . The recognition of friends in a 
purely spiritual world is something of which we can 
frame no conception whatever. . . . We have not 
^. the faintest shadow of evidence wherewith to make it 
seem probable that mind can' exist except in connection 
with a spiritual body." — Prof. John Fiske. 



78 ELECTRICITY AND 

There could be no more signal illustration of the 
uncertainty of always following scientists implicitly 
than their dogmatic assertions that thought is the 
product of molecular motions in the brain. This has 
been and is being announced and accepted with owlish 
gravity in educated assemblages, by blind leaders of 
the blind, who had and have no conception of the 
kind of "motion/' never saw the motion, and only 
jumped to the conclusion, like the cheap intuitionists, 
as they always do when ignorant. They surrender 
everything to the mere "scientific method of conclu- 
sion.'' The latest opinion of scholars of conceded re- 
spectability is that which accords with Revelation, that 
consciousness inheres in something more elusive than 
the brain matter. The fancy of molecular motion 
producing thought is a mere and gratuitous assump- 
tion. Of course thought and molecular motion of the 
brain accompany each other while thought has a brain 
for the purpose of worldly uses. 

"The substance of the mind that permeates the brain 
I IS inter-etheric, and is the element by which the brain 
is impregnated. ... By this soul-substance the / 
physical is controlled." — ^J. W. Keeley. 

'The phenomena of human consciousness must be re- 
garded as activities of some other form of real being 
than the molecules of the brain. . . . This real being 
is the mind. . . . The so-called mental faculties are 
only the modes of the behavior in consciousness of this 
real being. . . . The development of mind can only 



THE RESURRECTION. 79 

be regarded as the progressive manifestation in con- 
sciousness of the life of a real being which, although tak- 
ing its start and direction from the action of the physi- 
cal elements of the body, proceeds to unfold powers that 
are sui-generis, according to laws of its own." — Pro- 
fessor Ladd. 



"If there is anything that has been taught to us by the 
most advanced stage of science as applied to the 
anatomy, the physiology and pathology of the brain, it 
is the fact that the utmost degree of mental aberration 
may exist without the slightest change being percepti- 
ble to our senses in the normal structure of the central 
organ of the mind." — Dr. William A. Hammond. 



MATERIALISM. 

Free will and moral culture dominate the bodily in- 
clinations. Vacher of France, the fiendish and cold 
blooded murderer of many victims, guillotined in 1899, 
was supposed to have a mal-formed or mal-conditioned 
brain, but at the autopsy his brain was declared to be 
"perfect in structure and molecular texture." So his 
deviltry was in the ether that was in the brain, not of 
the brain. The materialists answxr that we cannot 
conceive thought or passion to be in the nerve fluid any 
more than we can conceive it to be the result of 
physical matter. No more can we conceive attraction 
to be in matter and yet it is there. 

This claim that tnere is always an exact correspon- 
dence between molecular action in the brain and mental 



8o ELECTRICITY AND 

action is only a dogmatic inference. It has never been 
seen by any microscope or measured by any instru- 
ment. If the mind were the result of bodily organization 
we would be mere fated machines, literally mechanical 
automatons. But we see the mind or mental action is 
not synchronous with bodily action, growth or con- 
dition. The old age of intelligent and learned people 
shows this. The bright and studious mind continues 
in its force through bodily pain, inanity and debility. 
There may not always be force of transmission or 
force of expression, but consciousness and reflection 
are as clear and enjoyments and sorrows are as acute. 
The writer of this, meeting a dozen of his war com- 
rades after separation of twenty-eight years, across the 
span from youth to maturity, could not recognize one 
of them bodily nor could they recognize him ; but upon 
introduction, their manners, voices and spirits of 
former days were exactly and instantly manifest and 
recognized. Their souls had not changed with bodily 
change. At the same re-union General Sickles said: 



"I want to say a few words to you about Pleasanton. 
I am glad to tell you that my visit to him this afternoon 
was not at all painful, as I was afraid that it might be, 
for although he has been a sufferer for three years in the 
same room and in the same bed, that dauntless spirit, 
that heroic heart, that brave eye that led our cavalry to 
so much glory in the war were all there still. As his 
pale face rested upon the white pillow, the soul of 
Pleasanton was there — not the sinewy frame that defied 



THE RESURRECTION. 8l 

fatigue and danger, but the soul was there, and he was 
never more animated." 

By these phenomena we must see that the soul has 
an independent existence. 

"But I find a law in my members warring against the 
law of my mind." — Paul. 

That remark of Paul's shows that to his appre- 
hension, also, the ''members'' do not make the mind. 
If mind were the result of molecular action the law 
of the members would be the law of the mind, mechan- 
ically, and the mind would have no law of its own. 

"You may say that the soul is nothing but the result 
of bodily powers. Why, then, is my soul more luminous 
when my bodily powers begin to fail? Winter is on my 
head and eternal spring is in my heart. There I breathe 
at this hour the fragrance of the lilacs, the violets and 
the roses as at twenty years ago. The nearer I approach 
the end, the plainer I hear around me the immortal 
symphonies of the worlds which invite me." — Victor 
Hugo. 

"But I may say of him as I said of Sherman shortly 
before his death and in his presence: 'He will never die.* 
Sherman declared, 'My body will die.' I said, 'Your 
body. General, is not you.' " — General Howard. 

SOUL AND BODY NOT SYNCHRONOUS. 

The soul does not follow the body in its change, hut 
like the nut ripens in sweetness, perfection and virility 



S2 ELECTRICITY AND 

while the bark and shell that are grown with and of it 
shrivel, dry up and fall away to decay and dispersion 
like our bodies. While the soul looks into the mirror 
and beholds the changes coming over its tenement, 
evidenced by grey hairs and wrinkles — strange, seem- 
ingly unnatural and generally unwelcome visitors ; or 
like libellous notices affixed upon a house, or like the 
wear and decay of the house while the occupant within 
is unchanged and unchanging — the soul itself is all 
the while growing brighter, clearer, happier and 
stronger. True, the kernel of the nut finally loses its 
identity in its decay, or change into a tree, because it 
has no morals or individuality ; but the soul, unlike the 
nut, contains mind and volition which keep it together 
as long as there is moral inducement to exist. Soul 
and body are built on analogous laws with the nut 
and its sheathing — indespensable at first but not at 
last. 

Another phenomenon indicating that the soul is a 
separate quantity from the mere physical elements of 
the body, is the wide differences between people in 
their expression of life, thought and feeling. In differ- 
ent persons having physical quantities apparently the 
same there is a mental makeup in one that we call ''in- 
teresting" that is not in the other. One soul is all 
force, light of the eye, eloquence of manner, usefulness, 
until the skin seems to narrow to hold it all ; while an- 
other with a similar body, is dull, uninteresting and 
cold. 



THE RESURRECTION. 83 

The celestial visions of the dying are at their 
maximum of brightness when the body is perishing. 
Brown Sequard states that in the last moments of 
cholera victims, even when the blood has decayed, the 
mind has b.een bright. The mind then must have been 
within the ether left within the brain. The ether 
cannot become decayed because it is ultimate. We 
have only to recall the dominant will and courage of 
explorers in arctics and tropics, and of soldiers, rising 
above bodily suffering and driving themselves on to 
death, in an inextinguishable love for science or fame, 
to settle once for all the independence of the soul and 
the false claims of materialism. There is no real par- 
allel between the two. Is it not clear from these phe- 
nomena that there is an original quantity of soul back 
of and independent of the body that goes forth to 
cheer, warm and help, and that fashions and builds 
up the body, coming as it does with the first protoplasm 
from the main fountain of God-life, or guiding the 
growth as it does in the little seeds that, from the same 
spot of earth, form flowers, vines and trees ? 

Love is divine, immortal, from the skies, and is 
something which the molecules do not manufacture. 
It animates the molecules of the body, lightens the 
step, brightens the eye, thrills the frame and prolongs 
the life. It would be instinctively absurd to reverse 
this proposition and say that love is made by the 
bright eye, the thrilling frame, the fibers of the body, 
the light step ; it is something beyond the body. The 



x 



84 ELECTRICITY AND 

sparkle is not of the eye; it is of something behind 
the eye and not of fiber or of molecule. Bosoms of 
society with more than floral or jewelled wealth, throb 
not with mechanism but with something farther away 
than mold and rust. Some eyes are as deep as the 
ocean while others, just as complete structurally, are 
dull, inexpressive. 

When one gives a coin to a ragged, dishevelled 
child with bare, dirty feet and legs, as she delves in 
a city ash barrel, surrounded by moral and physical 
decay, her eyes, because of the deep, immortal life be- 
hind them, sparkle with joy and gratitude more bril- 
liant than crown diamonds. 



"Shall we meet again? I have asked that dreadful 
question of the hills that looked eternal, of the streams 
that flow forever, of the stars among whose fields of 
azure my spirit hath walked in glory. All were dumb. 
But while I gaze upon thy face I feel 'that thereMs 
something in the love that mantles through its beauty 
that cannot wholly perish. We shall meet again."— ^ 
Ion to Clemanthe. 



The soul, to be immortal, must be of an immortal es- 
sence. As far as human discovery has gone it can 
suggest no other essence than t he luminiferous ether. 
What is the substance into which all matter inor- 
\ ganic, as well as organic, is now said to be resolvable 
^ and from which all things have been developed? 



THE RESURRECTION, 85 

'The present universe must have been developed out 
of and will again sink into something older and more 
lasting, which can be nothing else than the unseen uni- 
verse of ether." — Quarterly Review. 



''Science is rapidly lessening the elements in the direc- 
tion of the belief in but one original material substance, 
vv^hence the step is shorter and easier to the spirit which 
must be held to precede all matter. And so long as it 
is impossible, as is well known, to reach the finer forms 
of matter itself, with man's best devices, it becomes 
about as easy to believe in spirit as in such imponder- 
able, intangible matter." — Brooklyn Eagle. 

"I have long held an opinion, almost amounting to 
conviction, in common I believe with many other lovers 
of natural knowledge, that the various forms under 
which the forces of matter are made manifest, have one 
common origin, or in other words, are so directly re- 
lated and mutually dependent, that they are convertible 
as it were, one into another, and possess equivalent of 
power in their action." — Faraday. 

"There is but one form of matter out of which the 
successively more complex forms of matter are built." — 
Spencer. 

ATOMICITY. 



This ether is a material substance. ^'Non-material 
substance" has never been warranted in reason but has 
had its rise in early vagaries. We cannot say that 
there are particles of substance smaller than atoms, 
because the particles, or divisions, would be atoms. 



86 ELECTRICITY AND 

It is not necessary that ultimate matter be par;ticled in 
/ and of itself except as usable by the Divine Will. 
Atomicity may be considered to be the boundary of 
the physical universe but not of the material universe. 
Atoms are vortici of spirit matter like a whirlwind in 
still air or a whirlpool in still water, by^the spirit of 
God, and beyond that there is as much of the universe 
as this side of it. 



''It seems probable that God, in the beginning, formed 
matter into solid, hard, impenetrable particles, of such 
sizes, figures, and with such other properties, and in 
such proportions to space, as most conduced to the end 
for which he formed them; these primitive particles, be- 
ing solid, are incomparably harder than any porous 
body composed of them; even so hard as never to wear 
or break in pieces, no ordinary power being able to 
divide what God himself had made one in the first 
creation." — Newton. 



The forming of the matter into hard particles is 
the formation of the ether into atoms. 



SOUL CHEMICAL. 

" The last triumph of chemistry,* says Rothe, 'will be 
a spiritual body, perfectly responsible to our will and 
possessing immortality.' " — Prest. J. W. Bashford. 

The following from Edgar A. Poe's story on Mes- 
merism is given in his exact but selected words: 



/ 



/ 



THE RESURRECTION, 87 

'These gradations of matter increase in rarity and 
fineness until we arrive at a matter unparticled — without 
particles, indivisible, one. The ultimate or unparticled 
matter not only permeates all things but impels all 
things, and thus is all things within itself. This matter 
is God^ . . . The unparticled matter, or Go d in 
quiescence, is what men call mind. When we reach 
the ether we feel an almost irresistible inclination to 
class it with spirit, or nihility; the only conception which 
restrains us is that of its atomic constitution. . . . 
Take now a step beyond the ether — conceive matter as 
much more rare than that as that is than metal and we 
arrive at once at a unique mass — and unparticled mat- 
ter. . . . There is no irreverence in this. God, with 
all the powers attributed to spirit, is but the perfection 
of matter. This unparticled matter in motTon is thought. 
In general this motion is the universal thought of the 
universal mind. This thought creates. All created 
things are but the thoughts of God. The universal mind 
is God. For new individualities mxatter is not necessary. 
Mind existing, unincorporate, is merely God. To create 
individual thinking beings it was merely necessary to 
incarnate portions of the divine mind. Thus mjin is 
individualized. Divested of corporate investiture, he 
were God. Now, the particular motion of the incar- 
nated portions of the unparticled matter is the thought 
of man, as the motion of the whole is that of God. It 
is the nature of thought to be irrevocable. Man will 
never be bodiless. Our present incarnation is progres- 
sive; our future is perfected, ultimate, immqrtal." 

These views of the gradations of matter beyond 
ether were before the modern developments of elec- 
tricity that could have suggested it to Poe; and they 
now demonstrate the wonderful power of his intu- 
ition. 



88 ELECTRICITY AND 

'We predict that the mysterious force atom called 
your soul will exist and know itself and its friends ten 
thousands of billions of centuries from now and be as 
young as ever." — New York Journal. 

Scientists talk of the bombardment of the atoms and 
the undulations of the ether. They have never seen 
them but we all believe in them. They speak of vor- 
texal rings of the ether making the atom solid by its 
rapid motion. Only so long as the will of God has 
a fixed system may we talk about the atom as an in- 
divisible thing of permanency. The atom is not soluble 
by human power although everything else is. The 
ether is the clay of the apparent or sensible universe; 
the atoms are the first bricks, and the Almighty is the 
moulder ; this is a truth, without metaphor. It is pre- 
cisely by the analogies used by scientists that we as- 
sume that the soul is ether and is the body of the mind. 
We have to proceed upon axioms which are given to 
us by nature, if not directly from God Himself. Scien- 
tists, too, often go by guess-work. Many materialistic 
minds about us cannot comprehend this and cannot 
grasp first principles. They will have to wait ; we do 
not appeal to them ; they are making money and their 
heads are harder than their gold. 

"The brutish man knoweth not neither doth the fool 
comprehend these things." 

Of course the origin of the ether is unknowable, but 
we do know that atoms and molecules are motions of 



THE RESURRECTION, gg 

something else, like the whirlpools of force in still 
water. We cannot conceive of those whirlpools caus- 
ing themselves ; there is an intelligence within them to 
do this. The heart of God is the dynamo at the power 
house that keeps up the apparent universe. This ether 
and its energy are God, His soul and body, a universal 
being or organism composed of both sentience and 
substance, united, connate and eternal. When scien- 
tists start with this idea they will do less floundering. 

\ * ''God is to-day that great undistinguishing energy 
which science has just found out. You call it energy; 
I call it God. He is everywhere, a personality, a being 
of which we can form no conception.'* — Henry Ward 
Beecher. 

The human body is filled with an electric telegraph 
system, along which, from the brain, courses the nerve 
fluid which is none other than the ether. In this ether 
reposes our intelligence, the seat of which is in the 
brain. There, in the brain, we localize our sentient 
ego. We do not think from the foot or from the stom- 
ach. By our knowledge of anatomy we know that in 
the brain is found the center of the electric system of 
the body. How this will, that is not matter, moves 
the ether, we can never understand. Zeno reasoned : 
''Matter cannot bje moved except by matter; the mind 
moves the body and therefore mind is matter." Still, 
the will being the initial, and the will not being matter, 
we cannot understand how the two come together, be- 



90 



ELECTRICITY AND 



lieving, as we do, that they are utterly unlike, anti- 
thetical and independent. We must adopt the idea of a 
self-moving material thing or adopt idealism and fatal- 
ism, one dream of God involving all else. Now, if 
this self-moving thing is a mass of ether we see 
clearly how it moves the body through the nerves, 
precisely as the electricity from the dynamo moves, 
through the wire, the motor. This third thing, the 
agent between the volition and the physical body, we 
know is nerve energy, which we call electricity, which 
Tesla calls the ether. As wireless telegraphy is now 
understood to be waves of ether, so telepathy, or mind 
reading without the usual senses, is mental wireless 
telegraphy. 

SPIRIT FORMS. 

In this philosophy we must meet the criticism about 
the form of the soul, which, once predicated, is fol- 
lowed by every imagining about features, organs, 
clothing, furniture, equipment, employment, environ- 
ment, etc. We assume that life beyond will be ethereal, 
which will remove us from the grosser necessities of 
physical organism and law to which we are subjected 
here. There we shall not eat, digest, excrete, procreate 
nor have the corresponding organs. Our substance 
will be of the Holy Ghost and need no renovation. 
We shall not walk and therefore shall not have legs, 
but will move by electric waves and have ''the wings 
of angels." We shall not work and therefore shall 



THE RESURRECTION, 



91 



not have hands, and will forego the harp for soul 
music, as here in the higher grades of harmony the 
vocal supersedes the instrumental Then, O Paul, 
what kind of spiritual body shall we have? Let us 
see: 

When we look into the eyes of friend or lover, 
even here, we regard naught but the intellectual and 
spiritual light shining through the eyes and face; we 
forget for the moment even the clothing that enwraps 
them. Manner and animation make an interesting 
personality, not form, feature and color. We care but 
little about, nor we do not know, the plainness of our 
parents' features in their divine outpourings of love 
and sacrifice for us. When rapt in admiration of a 
song queen we do not see the trail of her robe, nor do 
we notice the size of an orator's feet while we are under 
the spell of his intellect and emotions. The child in 
its personal loves and reverences knows naught of 
physiology. So the disembodied soul, though of 
homogeneous ether may have some discernment of 
moral differentiation; for even here the features are 
not all that we read soul from. There are refined 
natures, particularly of the youth, who take no note of 
gross bodily conditions, are almost blind to them, and 
live only in the upper realms of imagination. For peo- 
ple who carry their criticism or pruriency so far as 
details of form and organism it may well be conjec- 
tured, if conditions of modesty or shame should arise, 
which are not likely, that out of the ether, which is 



92 



ELECTRICITY AND 



the parent of all matter, clothing can be made, not 
textiles, bat some kind of ethereal or moral wrap. 
We came into this world naked and must go back in 
the same condition, no more thinking of clothing than 
we do now of it regarding our new born babes, or than 
mankind in their primitive purity did when 



'Innocence that as a veil, 

Had shadowed them from knowing ill." 

—Milton. 



But even the ether itself, being material, may have 
organic laws and conditions. No violence is done to 
reason in assuming complete organic outfit in the next 
world as here. (See Dr. Chalmers' ''New Heavens 
and the New Earth/') Then mayhap the soul will be 
only an illuminated face, or like the winged cherubim 
heads conceived by the inspired painters. One form 
is as good as another. Our organization in the next 
world will likely be only a refined extension of this 
world's laws and conditions. There we shall pass the 
time in the most delightful intellectual, emotional and 
moral communion with organizations to fit moral con- 
ditions, as we do here in our most exalted hours. 
There we shall have hand-to-hand and face-to-face 
joy, with minds emancipated, disenthralled, clarified, 
enlarged. Ambition, pleasure and social zest will have 
full scope, maybe analogous to this life, maybe dif- 
ferent. 



THE RESURRECTION. 



93 



In this philosophy of earnest reaching forward to 
a reunion of betterment and reward, it is not necessary 
to construct scientifically and logically one flawless, 
complete, all-embracing system of heavenly life, an- 
swering every collateral and pertinent question that 
may arise, such as the form and size of the soul, trans- 
migration, pantheism, souls of animals, environment, 
function, employment, etc., if we can, to start with, 
rationally construct a sound analogy as to our resur- 
rection from this chrysalis state which, while it is 
irrefutable, does not outrage any of the faiths of man- 
kind nor any law, yet gives hope, comfort and salva- 
tion to those who cannot rise to a biblical faith. 

In pursuing any line of investigation, we are not 
expected to encompass all truth. We know space 
exists, but we are not expected to know its boundaries. 
But in this question of a soul body, we can draw some 
parallels. These questions can be answered by the 
analogy of the physical body. In the phenomena of 
organic sentience we have seen that mere size bears 
no relation to sentience. We can point to organized 
beings that are not larger than the molecule, showing 
every intellectual faculty. Can we conceive the size 
of the brain-center of such a being? The question of 
the quantity of soul matter is not important to sentient 
existence, any more than the quantity of physical mat- 
ter is important in making an organized being, al- 
though quantity produces relative power in this world. 
The apparency of expressive and effective strength of 



94 ELECTRICITY AND 

the mental ego depends upon the quantity like any 
other force. 



"The soul is a living organism/' — Drummond. 

So it is not necessary in adopting this theory of soul 
matter, to inquire into the size and shape of the mind 
any more than it is to inquire into the size and shape 
of God. It may take shape as the body takes shape. 
One would be no more miraculous than the other. If 
the soul is a substance, what is to hinder it from hav- 
ing form as our body has form? Spiritual forms and 
features would be no more unnatural than physical 
forms and features. Both are organisms of the 
original element. 

The soul is like any other organized being. Its 
strength and scope for worldly application depends 
upon its mass and quality of substance the same as the 
animal body. Perhaps soul without some central 
egoistic impulse of cohesion may lose or gain quantity, 
as the body does, and thus annihilate its individuality. 
We do not know at what point exactly the loss of vital 
energy results in physical death. In the same way we 
do not know at what precise point the loss of spiritual 
energy or the separation of soul-substance or mass 
might destroy the soul ego. If one ego loses its par- 
ticles or portions they will probably accrete with other 
egos, carrying their modicum of sentience along with 
them. There can be limited sentience or extended 



THE RESURRECTION, 95 

sentience; intense sentience or dull sentience. This 
diffusion, affinity and interchange of soul substance 
is like the diffusion and affinity of gases, or like lim- 
ited reincarnation. 

ATOMIC LIFE. 

That the individual atom has some kind of inchoate 
limited life, is probable. 

"Oh, the untraveled continents of mystery in a crystal 
of snow. Oh, the God in the atom."— T. DeWitt Tal- 
mage. 

We can readily understand a complete atom having 
an ego of life, perhaps unconscious life, like. the new- 
born infant, and how a molecule is an organized ego, 
sexed, and capable of a sentient soul. But as atoms 
and molecules, may be divided infinitely so may their 
ego be practically destroyed by disintegration, having 
fused back into the animal sentient ego. The micro- 
scope is discovering living animals as minute as any 
conception the mind can form of an atom. There are 
animals of whom it will take one hundred and sixty 
thousand, end to end, to reach the length of an inch. 
How do we know that every molecule and atom is not 
a living thing? 

— - ^ "I believe the amoeba has will."— Prof. John M. Tyler. 



/ 



96 ELECTRICITY AND 

"Does an atom, infinitesimally small, seem too minute 
to be the ethereal abiding place of a living creation?" — 
Antoinette Brown Blackwell. 



"Each improvement of the microscope displays races 
of animals too minute to have been observed before, 
and which would require the heaping together of mill- 
ions upon millions to be visible to the naked eye. And 
each of these is composed of members as admirably 
suited to its mode of life as those of the largest species. 
Their motions display all the phenomena of vitality, 
sense and instinct. Nor are their actions blind and 
fortuitous, but evidently governed by choice and directed 
to an end. They have their appetites to gratify and 
their dangers to avoid. They possess circulating sys- 
tems, often highly complex, and blood with globules 
bearing to them by analogy the same proportions in size 
that ours do to us." — Professor Kane. 



"All that has been predicted of atoms, their attraction 
and repulsion, according to the primary laws of their 
being, only becomes intelligible when we assume the 
presence of mind." — Sir J. W. F. Herschell. 



There is no other way to account for energy in mat- 
ter and the conservation of force than by a direct and 
present volition of God in each atom. The groping of 
physicists without this idea is heathenish, ungrateful, 
materialistic, and, in the last analysis, is unscientific, 



"Crystals, according to Professor Judd, have a quasi 
life, and may be said to act and to think almost as much 
as some of the lower animals." — Marie Morelli. 



THE RESURRECTION, 97 

All forms of matter, organic and inorganic, had' 
their germs in the Almighty's mind ; it was His idea in 
each instance that moulded the atoms and molecules 
into living things. After that each species produced 
its own seed as one of their many functions. 



''Glorify thou me with thine own self, with the glorj^ 
which I had with Thee before the world was." — John 
XVII. 



ALL LIFE IN ONE. 

As to the continuity of ethereal life we feel instinc- 
tively that we reach backward and will continue on- 
ward, as in chemical persistency and affinity. In our 
wakeful condition we have reachings of memory, and 
in our dreams vivid and repeated pictures of scenes 
that we have not experienced in this world, draughts 
from the deep well of the soul. We see this principle 
in our babes at their birth, in their display of family 
character, in their first expressions or first cry. We 
do not look upon our children as being wholly of us, 
but that we are to a degree channels through which 
their antecedents have come. This wave of heredity 
brings with it psychic quality, as the wave in the sea 
contains a living, moving force within it, separate 
from the particles of water which it contains. In a 
child we see the disposition of the father in the bodily 
qualities of the mother, and the disposition of the 



98 ELECTRICITY AND 

mother in the bodily qualities of the father. If life 
were a mere "touching up at birth/' as some have ex- 
plained it, there could not be this intuitive connection 
with the past nor this heredity of ideas and of mental 
temperament. 

"My substance was not hid from Thee when I was 
made in secret and curiously wrought in the lowest 
parts of the earth. Thine eye did see my substance, 
yet being unperfect, and in thy book all my members, 
which in continuance were fashioned when yet there 
was none of them. 

As physical cells are units of life, and their multi- 
plication constitutes _the animal body, so does the 
multiplication of the lives of the cells constitute the 
soul mass in its entire individuality. 



THE RESURRECTION. 99 



CHAPTER IV, 



PSYCHISM. 

The Pentecostal flame — Human magnetism — Social mag- 
netism — Soul corporeity — Electricity and humanity — Vege- 
table electricity — Vitality — The electric voice — Ethero-mater- 
ialism — Bible psychism — Personal devil — Wireless telegraphy 
and telepathy — Ether the body of God — The human body a 
dynamo — Sex in matter — Electrocution of criminals. 

The Bible throughout treats of the soul as having 
a separate, dynamic, material force but little different 
from that of ordinary physical phenomena. 

"And when the day of Pentecost was fully come they 
were with one accord in one place. And suddenly there 
came a sound from heaven as of a rushing mighty wind 
and it filled all the house v/here they were sitting. And 
there appeared unto them cloven tongues like that as 
of fire, and it sat upon each of them. And they were 
all filled with the Holy Ghost and began to speak with 
other tongues as the spirit gave them utterance." 

If the Holy Ghost is a mere consciousness, without 
a substance, can it sound like the rushing of the wind, 
or appear as cloven tongues of fire? Here was the 
spirit of God directly manifest to the physical senses. 



lOO ELECTRICITY AND 



HUMAN MAGNETISM. 

' The animal system is the best form of magnet. Its 
magnetism might be inferred from its friction of cir- 
culation, digestion and breathing. The nervous sys- 
tem is a complete telegraphic system. This magnetic 
or nerve fluid is proved to be the direct agent between 
the will and the body ; and it brings persons and society 
into contact and accounts for hypnotic phenomena, 
mind reading and telepathy. Take a small piece of 
demagnetized steel, like a hand of a clock or the 
segment of a watch spring, and poise it upon a needle 
stuck in a cork. Then take a bar of demagnetized 
wrought iron, test it with the swivel to see that it has 
no magnetic force. Then grasp the center of the 
bar with the hands touching each other. Have the 
feet insulated by rubber, silk or oilcloth, and rest an 
arm upon a bottle to hold it steadily. Bring the end 
of the bar to lap the needle a quarter of an inch, hold- 
ing it as close to the needle as possible without bring- 
ing them in contact with each other. Have patience. 
There may be twenty minutes before attraction ap- 
pears. The phenomena will be somewhat capricious. 
But you will find that you have imparted your mag- 
netism to the bar and that the bar will deflect the 
needle, even if the needle be covered by a goblet. 
This proves that animal magnetism and cosmic mag- 
netism are identical. Diflferent bars have different 



THE RESURRECTION, loi 

powers, just as different people have. The experiment 
is more satisfactory when the swivel is first balanced 
in the direction north and south. This may explain 
why sleep is better with the body prone east and 
west. Each blood corpuscle is a complete magnet 
with its polarity. The magnetic current is every- 
where more active in the lines of north and 
south. This might affect the magnetism in 
the brain to more activity. Of course to young, 
tired and rugged persons this would be un- 
appreciable; but insomnists have found the ob- 
servance of this law profitable. Ill and enfeebled per- 
sons find it profitable to lie north and south by reason 
of an increase that would be produced in their nervous 
circulations. The magnetic quantity acts just like any 
other physical quantity. The swivel that is attracted 
by the hand magnetic bar will impart its current to a 
needle floating on w^ater. The needle phenomenon 
will operate the mental disposition of the operator to 
the contrary notwithstanding, if there be but animal 
contact. A steel bar, round, one-half inch in diameter 
and about two and a half feet long, is effective because 
of its ability to hold power for some length of time. 
Several fresh bars and several light swivels are neces- 
sary for experiment to assure the experimenter of the 
entire absence of magnetism in the irons, prior to 
each individual test. Soft iron bars are most satisfac- 
tory because they are less likely to possess latent mag- 
netism than steel bars, and soft iron is magnetically 



102 ELECTRICITY AND 

influenced sooner than steel. This animal magnetism 
is precisely like all other physical forces, not uncertain 
nor mysterious, but its manifestation is proportional 
to the character of physical circumstances and to the 
ingenuity of manipulation. Persons impart it best in 
the morning. Strong, healthy, positive persons secure 
better results than their opposites could. Several per- 
sons holding a bar are better than one. But there is an 
unaccountable and perplexing irregularity about the 
results of experiments in this line and they are as 
varied as are the several personal temperaments. A 
bar warmed by artificial heat — without animal contact 
— will not exhibit this magnetic power. 

There is no limiting the reach and influence of this 
animal magnetism. We are as dull to its possibilities 
now, and to the material substance of the soul, as a 
generation ago we were to the possibilities of elec- 
tricity. When the wall of misoneism shall be com- 
pletely broken through we shall be as rapt in 
amazement at spiritual fields lying beyond as if, by a 
certain discovery of lenses and photography, we should 
see the moving human life, business and sports upon 
the planet Mars. 

"In the year 1872, I obtained from Mr. John Beattie, 
of Bristol, England, a retired photographer, a set of 
photographs that exhibited appearances which could 
only be accounted for by an assumption of the extrusion, 
from the bodies of one or more of the five sitters en- 
gaged in the experiments, of a nerve aura or vital stuff, 



THE RESURRECTION, 103 

ready prepared and possessing chemical properties ac- 
tive enough to affect the sensitive plate, without being 
visible to ordinary eyes. We at once recognize the 
enormous importance in the fact that one nervous sys- 
tem could be proved to physically influence another 
without contact; in other words, that we had discovered 
the physical basis of sympathy or rapport." — Dr. John 
E. Purdon. (Before the Physical Science Congress.) 



"A Russian scientist has proved by experiment that 
the human body is an electric pile, and that the skin 
sends off over the whole surface an endless number of 
electric sparks so small that they cannot be discerned 
by the naked eye, yet so distinct in reality that they can 
be photographed." — New York World. 



VEGETABLE MAGNETISM. 

Mr. Elwood Cooper, of San Diego, California, is 
authority for the statement of a freak of vegetable 
nature showing a quality precisely like animal instinct, 
in a root going directly sixty feet distant to the mois- 
ture of a decayed wooden sewer, until stopped by a 
wall of masonry, then clambering up the wall three 
feet to a hole, through the hole and thence down again 
to the sewer and following the side of the sewer on 
the far side of the wall. Waiving now the question of 
limited sentience in the plant, there was an ethereal 
or magnetic attraction of the moisture, perhaps in- 
conceivably subtle, through that hole, but precisely 
like the blind instinct of men and brutes. We think 



104 ELECTRICITY AND 

that these facts show that ethereal affinity in sentient 
life is the same as it is in plants and minerals. 

There is no possible analogy or proof to deny, from 
appearances, that young plants, neglected in the parch- 
ing sun, sentiently enjoy the refreshing spray from a 
friendly hand as the helpless infant does the soothing 
touch or drop of water on its fevered lips. Many 
horticulturists, even gardeners and farmers, believe 
that flowers and vegetation respond to and reward 
human sympathy, aside from merely mechanical and 
physical tillage. Who that has watched a tiny seed 
and visited the sprout hour by hour, bending over its 
tender and uncertain life, can feel no difference be- 
tween its apparent mute gratitude and that of the 
cradle or the crib? *'Sing to your plants and they 
will thrive," is an old adage. Mannish women cannot 
raise plants ; under their presence the plants wither and 
die, although cultivated in imitation of qualities more 
feminine. A simple experiment will bring home to 
the mind this principle of mechanical or involuntary 
association of humanity. Slice off about a dozen thin 
discs of a small cork or rubber stopper. Place upon 
each disc some steel filings, magnetized, and float 
them all upon water, about an inch apart. A thin film 
of kerosene oil floating upon the water, to prevent 
induction, is preferable to the surface of the water 
itself. Then, if there be a few stray filings floating 
on the liquid, independent of the discs, there will ap- 
pear, in the nebulous condensations of these inde- 



THE RESURRECTION. 



105 



pendent filings, not only an example of the cosmic 
influences between the heavenly spheres, but also an 
am.using illustration of the blind and passive move- 
ments of society, in consolidation and centralization, 
when not counteracted by free will and intelligence. 
First two discs will approach each other ; a third will, 
after an apparent hesitancy, join the two ; then a fourth 
will come ; then other cliques will form ; then there will 
be a scramble to join the largest; finally they will all 
coalesce. Sometimes one will apparently be left and 
will roll about the circumference to find an interstice 
and will fit itself in, satisfied. The weakness and 
flunkiness of society and the mechanical dominion of 
personal and central forces is thus well illustrated. 

PUBLIC MAGNETISM. 

Now, this magnetism being found in all animal life, 
and having a mutual interaction with the conscious- 
ness, does it not, allied to mind, tend to account for 
many of our social phenomena? Is there not in our 
tendency to congregate a mechanical or merely mag- 
netic as well as volitional power? It may be simply 
bodily magnetism that at times draws people together 
by blind impulse and without choice, but we think 
that this phenomenon approaches toward our position 
that the sentient ego of man has a material base, always 
considering magnetism to be a substance in motion. i^ 



I06 ELECTRICITY AND 

That human sympathy is united to material cohesion 
is shown in our tendency to group about centers. In 
the physical universe attraction and gravitation shape 
everything into spheres, equi-distant and equi-potent 
from the center of attraction, like the worlds, planets, 
suns or raindrops. So masses of people, large or small, 
incline to a center equi-distant, not alone volitionally 
but also by material attraction. We speak of the fam- 
ily "circle," not of the family square or parallelogram. 
So cities have circular forms as far as possible, not 
alone for convenience as regards distance and space 
but also from involuntary attraction. 

"There is an extraneous force of will which acts upon 
matter in derogation of laws purely physical, or alters 
the balance of those laws among themselves." — W. E. 
Gladstone 

ETHERO-MATERIALISM. 

To this doctrine, that the soul is a conscious material 
substance with a self-continuing power, there are op- 
posed two classes of people; one is the ultra-mater- 
ialistic class which believes that mental action or sen- 
tience is only the product of physical life or friction, 
and that with the death of the body the mind vanishes, 
annihilates, leaving no soul residuum; the other is 
the class, including the religious sects in general, which 
believes that the soul is simply consciousness — an 
idea — and that at death it continues, without body or 



THE RESURRECTION. 107 

substance or locality and merely by the arbitration of 
God. But the corporeity of the soul is becoming more 
and more believed by acknowledged thinkers. If the 
soul is corporeal substance its resurrection is vouch- 
safed under essential moral conditions. 



**The soul is, consequently, the sensitive organ, not 
the body, and is therefore the true and real body of the 
spirit, and the body is only its outward framework, its 
shell and its covering." — Zschoke. 

"Of all reaHties the soul is the most solid, sound and 
undeniable." — Fiske. 

"The existence of finite beings unconditioned by time 
and space is inconceivable. The idea of soul passing 
I off into space like a puff of empty nothingness, without 
I form or substance, without any kind of organic function, 
still existing, but nowhere in particular, is about equiva- 
lent to annihilation." — Rev. Thomas Clark. 

"Mind is a circumscribed aggregate of activities, and 
the cohesion of these activities, one with another com- 
pels the postulation of some thing of which they are the 
activities." — Spencer. 

His ''activities" mean consciousness, and his "some 
thing" must be subtance. 

"We possess evidence that there exists an all-per- 
vading something, not to be defined as matter, but which 
may be regarded as the substantial medium of those 
actions known as light, heat, electricity, gravitation and 



I08 ELECTRICITY AND 

magnetism; that the mind operates on this medium in 
our visible bodies we find in the fact that a man, by ^ / 
the mere act of his will in contracting the muscles in X 
his arm, can cause a current of influence which sensibly / \ 
/ deflects the needle of the galvanometer. Every act of 
\/' will seems to act through an agency similar to that of 
[N an electric telegraph. The will being capable of rnoving 
This agency and being moved through it, may we not 
reasonably imagine it possible that the soul is to be 
forever associated with it in some specific and identical 
form? This agency is probably one with the all-pene- 
trating medium of the universe, called, ^or the lack of 
a name sufficiently definite, ether. It is calculated to 
serve as a spiritual body which, taking direction and 
impression from the soul, might be capable of influence 
and action in sympathy with all the changes of mental 
and physical of the universe." — Doctor George Moore. 



"Nature has stored up in the universe an infinite 
energy. The eternal recipient and transmitter of that 
energy is the ether." — Tesla. 



What apparent phenomenon is better fitted to give 
an idea of a concrete God than this universal ether? 
He cannot be with us or about us in any w^ay but as 
a substance. Do we know of any other substance 
\ more omnipresent or more omnipotent? God's power 
and manifestations are in all respects like electricity, 
as the white light in the burning bush, at the tomb of 
Jesus, in Elijah's fire at the altar, in Saul's light on 
the way to Dam.ascus, and in the pentecostal flame. 
The electric flame, flashing under our street car 
wheels, is brighter than the sun. Tinted with purest 



THE RESURRECTION, 



109 



pale blue from the heavens, it fills the imagination with 
the visions of Moses, Abraham, Saul and Mary. 

"His countenance was like the lightning/' — Matthew, 
xxviii :3. 

In the Bible, the Holy Ghost and the angels are 
spoken of as lightning, or fire, or the white light. In 
the French translation this light is always eclaire, — 
lightning. 



"And the God who answereth by fire, let him be God/' 
— Kings 18, 24. 



"God is a shape of pure electric radiance. He caused 
the earth to be inhabited and dominated by beings com- 
/ posed of earth's component parts, animal, vegetable and 
mineral, giving them their superiority by placing within 
them His likeness, in that form of an electric flame or 
germ of spiritual existence combined with His corf- 
panion working force of will power. In Christ was an 
elnbodied electric spirit. From first to last His career 
was attended by electric phenomena." — Marie Corelli. 

"And the angel of the Lord appeared unto him as a 
flame of fire." — Exodus, iii:2. 



Dr. Mortimore has written a book to prove that elec- 
tricity is the body of God. He makes this expression : 

"When we come to investigate the agency of spirit, 
we find that it is a fire, a principle or agent that per- 




no ELECTRICITY AND 

vades all nature, one which is indestructible. GjQjd's 
spirit is the source of light. There is evidence that light 
is a distinct force; that this force is creat i ve on matter 
sensitive to it- May we not, without destroying the 
conscience inculcated by our respective religious creeds, 
accept the old teaching and comprehend that God i s 
light? The postulate is simple; God is light ancf lignt 

•l JUJII*"^^*' ' -pim Minn- -1-"-^— '''■*^*''*^^^'*^'^'*' "nf win. -^rtMBfVflM^ 

is life."— H. P. Malet. 

"Paul saw a light in the heavens brighter than the 
noonday sun, and said, 'Who art thou. Lord?' Of course 
it was the Lord who had always appeared to the Jews 
that way, as in the burning bush, the pillar of fire, the 
Shekinah."— Dr. Meredith. 

"'^he body is supposed to contain within itself an 
electrical form just like itself — head, eyes, brain, tongue, 
armsVnegs, sex, organs; that at death this aerial form 
escapes the body; that it can die no more, but lives, 
suffers, thinks, enjoys in that other life; and that it is 
in all respects a human being still. This brief definition 
is as good as one occupying a hundred pages." — Dr. P. 
B. Randolph. 

*Tor all practical purposes we may treat electricity 
as if it were a material, incompressible fluid which, wGen 
in motion, produces certain effects that we can observe." 
— Faraday. 



Magnetism and electricity are one. The stream of 
magnetism through air will deflect a flame and produce 
heat by its friction to a point of melting metals. 

And why may not sentience occupy electricity as 
well as occupy the dissolvable compounds of the 



THE RESURRECTION. iii 

body? What is the pecuHarity of any part or element 
of the body that makes it adapted to mental contact 
and action? The body has six principle chemical ele- 
ments. Which of them contains the soul ? Or is there 
yet another element in the body, the element of all 
elements ? 

The^mechanical dynamo gathers , does not generate , 
electricity. The human body with its blood circula- 
tion is a dynamo, or galvanic jar of chemical attrition, 
gathering this life from the spaces. So the armature 
and the magnet do not generate or ''propagate" elec- 
tricity; they remove it from its natural spaces. 

"Dr. Augustus Waller, of the hospital schools, has 
recently made a number of experiments showing that 
it is possible to detect, by existing electrical instruments, 
the electric currents generated by each beat of the heart. 
Two people, holding each other by the hand, and con- 
nected by a capillary electrometer, give evidences of 
electrical shocks through each other. The hands of a 
single subject, dipped into two basins of w^ater in con- 
nection with the electrometer, give a deflection of the 
instrument at every beat of the pulse." — Philadelphia 
Press. 

"The animal body may be regarded as a galv amg^n- 
gine for the production of mechanical force from food 
and solar rays." — Dr. Gregory.^"" 

DEATH BY ELECTRICITY. 

Mere anatomy is lifeless. A man in full health and 
power, by the loss of a few ounces of blood and with- 



112 ELECTRICITY AND 

out lesion, is dead. The circulation being stopped 
I there is no friction or chemical action to gather elec- 
? tricity. Why friction in the dynamo, or the mere pass- 
ing of the armature by the magnet, without touch or 
friction, gathers electrical current, is another law yet 
beyond our powers of understanding. Without losing 
blood, when the current of electricity is diverted 
or shocked out of a man he is dead, although not a 
corpuscle of blood has been disturbed, just as the flame 
of a lamp is blown out, leaving all the vitality and 
principle of life remaining. Then the perfect body dis- 
integrates and is incapable of producing life. Possibly 
artificial friction, stimulant and galvanizing might 
call back another life like that of an infant. Is 
death by electrocution simply a displacement of the 
I soul, a dislocation or disarticulation, like one cur- 
rent of electricity driving out another, or one current 
of air in a room driving out the other air? Modern 
deaths by electricity have been a psychological revela- 
tion. There lies a perfect and warm dead body with- 
out a soul. Where now is the ''mode of motion" to 
make a soul? Does not this show conclusively that 
life and soul are wholly within something else than 
the body, something more elusive than molecular or 
atomic action ? 



"The practical results of the microscopical examina- 
tion are that the passage of the electrical current through 
the body is attended with no recognizable changes in 



THE RESURRECTION. 



113 



its tissues or organs. None of the cells in any of the 
tissues shows any signs of mechanical violence, such as 
tearing, fracture, or any disintegration of protoplasm. 
The blood cells are not damaged in any way by the cur- 
rent; even the blood plaques are unchanged." — Doctor 
Carlo McDonald. (New York Medical Journal, May 
14, 1892.) 

That which is ordinarily spoken of as human life, 
or mind, is a bundle of experiences. The dead body 
of a man electrocuted is simply a body with the vehicle 
containing those experiences shocked out of it. But 
whither has the bundle gone? Has it departed upon, 
and with some other essence, like another mass of elec- 
tricity? Another infusion of electricity would not, 
perhaps, restore life because the new electricity would 
be foreign to the individual. Possibly a new soul 
might be grafted upon the old body, or a new germ 
might be formed, and thus accrete back to the old ego, 
gradually like the Divine possibilities of the resurrec- 
tion or re-assembling of the physical body. We are 
upon the border of marvelous electrical discovery as 
related to biology. 

"Electricity is connected with biology." — Professor 
Vanderweyde. 

And biology is connected with psychology. After a 
capital execution by electricity, and before the doctors 
incontinently chop up the victim, a separate corps of 
scientists ought to be permitted to resuscitate after the 



114 



ELECTRICITY AND 



culprit is legally pronounced to be dead. The law 
does not call for two legal deaths. 

"The vital forces are essentially electrical; are ponder- 
able qualities." — Gustave Jaeger. 

" The soul/ says Doctor H. Stevenson, of this city, 
'is located in the corpus callosum, a little spongy body 
situated at the base of the brain, which has defied the 
efforts of the physicians in their endeavors to ascertain 
its uses in the human anatomy. The corpus callosum,* 
said the Doctor, 'is the seat of the imperishable mind, 
and is the great reservoir and storehouse of electricity, 
which is abstracted from IHe bio od^ ^^^^ the arteries, and 
conveyed through the nerve up the spinal cord to the 
corpus callosum.' " — Philadelphia Enquirer. 

"Electricity itself seems to be converted into vitality, 
as elsewhere it is converted into light, heat and chemical 
motion. When life can thus not only be renewed but 
actually transfused into the veins, or rather the nerves 
of a man, remains for psychological science to deter- 
mine." — E. P. Jackson. (North American Review.) 

The infusion of an unimpaired dead body with a 
new electricity might not infuse it with the old ex- 
periences, which are called "life/' ''mind/' "ego /' but 
we have no precedent in fact, nor reason in science, to 
declare that an unimpaired human anatomy, without 
lesion, with the identity of sentience completely dis- 
rupted from the nerve center, meaning death, may not 
germinate a new life by electricity, or by animal mag- 
netism and artificial respiration, the life of an idiot 



THE RESURRECTION. 115 

or of a new born infant, a new spiritual ego, foetus or 
protoplasm to be developed as a new person, a twin or 
graft upon the old body, but not bring back the former 
memory or mental ego. But then only a few scientists 
would believe that the condemned has really died. New 
quantities of electricity could not be expected to cause 
a sudden infusion of the same recollections and mental 
illuminations that have made the former life or con- 
sciousness. They have gone with the old electricity. 
If the memory reside in a mass or body of electricity 
it is an ego that cannot be duplicated, a self-built 
affair, an identity, a sentient history, the identity of 
which cannot be substituted by new electricity, al- 
though electricity be life of itself without experience — 

\ raw life. The mind or soul that has left the body 
was an ego, built up from the first ego germ ; but the 
restoration of a mere new animal or physiological life 
would not be restoring the same ego. Here we would 
have one body having had two souls, like an apple- 
tree with two different species. And yet, we have had 
in history, cases of prolonged double consciousness. 

It is easier to shock animals to death by electricity 
than men because they have less resistive power. A 
brute or man will resist the heat of an oven that will 
cook a dead one. The application of electricity to 
the human system to restore circulation and energy 
will become as common as the use of quinine or rum 
now is. The nerves may become clogged with effete 

\ nerve fluid and need purging. There is nothmg more 



Il6 ELECTRICITY AND 

exhilarating than an electric spray. Electric spraying 
chairs ought to-be ao common as barber chairs or boot- 
black stands. 

ELECTRICITY IN GERMINATION. 

As a further illustration of physical soul power, 
there are certain facts and analogies to give favor to 
the theory that sex and organization in the foetus are 
formed by nerve shock or mental force at the instant 
of coition, instead of by the ridiculous monstrosity of 
a seminal animalcule, or animal, as the beginning of 
an individual, each of which would need to have father 
and mother, and thus have a pre-existing sex. From 
the number present in an ordinary coitional function 
"millions'' of them are presented, eligible to ovarial 
absorption instead of the blind, mechanical and mir- 
aculous selection of only one. Of course we cannot 
comprehend or gainsay the minuteness of nature's 
operations, nor whole of the principle of selection or 
survival of the fittest. The presence of trichinae re- 
semblances in the fecundating secretion is not a proof 
that they are the germs, or cells, of an individual life. 
If they are, where were they born ? They would make 
the father the mother also, and the woman only a mere 
pot of earth, or incubator. But the woman contributes 
character and heredity to her progeny by her mental 
electricity. She and her family continue their own 
race. She is equally endued with humanity. The 



THE RESURRECTION, ny 

presence of spermatozoids may illustrate the virility 
of the seminal fluid by their being an active vital prin- 
ciple ; but they do not, by any test, proof or analogy, 
show that they are the individual predecessor, or be- 
ginning, of the animal individual. The granules that 
are present may be the fecundating power, struck 
into a spark of ego-life and beginning, or organism, 
by the intense mental fusion of the act of coition. The 
beginning of the ego may as well be there, that being 
the intensest moment of mental animal existence, as at 
some unknown time in the glands of the male. If the 
spermatozoids are animals with life, thie embryonic be- 
ginning of men, they must be well on in development, 
with all the animal qualities of an ego and the func- 
tions of a race of beings. If they are animals that 
would require a genesis there, in their habitat, and a 
family history and heredity, the doctors have dis- 
covered no such thing. They begin abruptly by 
claiming a sort of spontaneous generation of an animal, 
or species, within the testes of the male alone and with- 
out the ordinary copulation of those animals. Well 
proved phenomena of brute breeding show the power 
of sexual vigor in a parent to cast an opposite sex in 
a progeny. The female being the most vigorous, and 
her mental concept dominating over the male is, of 
course, a male image and a male issue is the result. 
The male being the most vigorous, this mental con- 
cept at the instant of coition is of course, if the stronger, 
a mental picture of a female and a female issue is the 



Ii8 ELECTRICITY AND 

result. At that instant the sex is stamped. Probably 
conception without a mental act would produce an idiot 
or hermaphrodite. Has any propagation of animal 
existence ever been known without mutual volition of 
the two sexes ? To this assumption that the individual 
is begun as a mental act at the instant of coition the 
spermatozoids have been cited. 

"The movements of the spermatozoid have no analogy 
to the voluntary act. Its motion is not even a proof of 
its animal origin." — Dalton's Physiology. 

"The process of incarnation, and the method by which 
the soul takes new forms, are in this wise. When two 
persons ally themselves in the flesh and beget a child, 
the moment of impregnation is usually, though not in- 
variably, the moment which attaches a soul to a newly 
conceived body. ... In the man the astral fluid 
becomes transformed into human life at the moment of 
conception. . . . Spirit is projected into matter in 
order that soul may be begotten thereby.*' — Anna Kings- 
for 

At the instant of coition the umbilicum is formed, 
electrically, between the seed and the ovum. Then 
the soul of the individual commences. 



THE RESURRECTION. 



119 



CHAPTER V. 

PSYCHIC PHENOMENA. 

Social cohesion by magnetism — Electric infection of disease 
— Social contagions, fads, fashions — The breath of life — At- 
mosphere propels the soul — The hand of God in electro- 
motive power — Electric oratory and command — Sympathy — 
Influences in the air. 

Like the myriad of aerolites that are falling unseen 
upon the land and into the sea, psycho-physical phen- 
omena are occurring everywhere, phenomena of which 
the public is not apprised ; only a few are seen. Every 
day in the public press all over the world are avouched 
facts. Readers will judge for themselves of their 
weight as testimony. They are not selected here as 
particularly forcible examples, but as representative 
of millions like them, enough in number to justify in- 
duction and to form a system of philosophy. 

In business the following mysterious facts have been 
noticed : One man or woman will compel custom, in- 
crease power of attraction over the public, get rich, 
and the most acute observer cannot tell how it is done, 
while another, superior in intelligence, character, en- 
ergy, capital and social standing, will utterly fail. The 



I20 ELECTRICITY AND 

difference lies in the active, soul-dynamic force that is 
used as an unseen, compulsory force, compelling 
patronage. Self-poise, quiet, watchfulness, persist- 
ency, will bring all under one's influence in time, like 
all physical accretion to the larger mass. 

If we inquire of those about us, we shall find very 
many people who have had some super-sensuous ex- 
perience. Failure to collate these experiences has left 
the world in ignorance of spiritual laws. This author 
has had narrated to him, by many persons of proven 
intelligence and honor, the coincidence of dreams and 
premonitions with facts afterwards discovered by them, 
in too many cases for publication. 



"A Chicago gentleman who is a prominent operator 
on the Board of Trade, and a vestryman of one of our 
Episcopal churches, the other day related an experience 
that fell under his own observation. 'Some years ago,' 
he said, 'my father, with whom I lived in an Iowa town, 
had a severe illness, from which he was convalescing at 
the time of the occurrence which I am about to relate. 
One evening upon going to his room he inquired where 
Levi Whiting had gone. I said that Levi Whiting, who 
lived in our old home in Western New York, had not 
been there, but that he had been dreaming. He said that 
Levi had been there, that he had had a good visit with 
him; and I failed to convince him that it was only a 
dream, of which I had no doubt. As far as we knew, 
Levi Whiting was in good health; but a few days after 
this we heard of his death and upon getting the particu- 
lars, it was found that he had died in New York tha 
same hour of this occurrence in Iowa. My father was 
a member of the Presbyterian church, was an exemplary 



THE RESURRECTION. 121 

Christian, and, as far as I knew, never saw a spiritual- 
istic medium in his life, but he always firmly believed 
that the spirit of his old neighbor had paid him a parting 
visit before leaving for the celestial abodes.' " — Chicago 
Journal. 

"Vincennes, Ind., March 20. — The body of John Mur- 
phy, who was drowned on March 7, was found this 
morning by Deputy Postmaster Roseman, who asserts 
that he was impelled to the river's side and to the very 
spot where the body was. This is the fifth body that 
has been found in an almost similar manner." — Clipping. 



TELEPATHY. 

Wherever a man goes he leaves his magnetic impress 
which radiates upon all who pass. Hunters say that 
when a fox jumps upon a rock or into the water and 
gets his feet "cold," the hound loses the ''scent." Along 
the cold city flagging of a winter day, where thousands 
of feet are scraping, the dog traces his master. Can 
it be odor? Cats, birds, and other animals, without 
geographical knowledge or calculation, have magnetic 
contact with the distant objects of their interest or 
affection. They do not scent or smell home fifty miles 
away. They are only living magnetic needles. The 
sense of direction in animals, so often attributed to 
scent, but still remaining to us miraculous, is probably 
a simple electric induction from a physical fact to con- 
sciousness, simple telepathy. In the operation of this 



122 ELECTRICITY AND 

faculty the pole of influence and sensitiveness is at the 
junction of the nostrils with the upper lip, which place 
is also the expression of sympathy and love. 

"One of the most interesting of those out-door ex- 
periments I have ever performed took place in Berlin 
twelve months ago last Easter. Having purchased an 
Easter tgg and put into it a quantity of gold, the ^gg 
was given to Mr. Kasson, the American Minister, to 
hide anywhere within a radius of a kilometer from the 
Hotel de Rome, which was the starting point. Ac- 
companied by Count Moltke, His Excellency Dr. Lucius, 
and Prince Ratibon, as a committee of inspection, Mr. 
Kasson took away the eg% and hid it while I remained 
with the balance of the committee in the hotel. In- 
stead of taking Mr. Kasson by the hand as I had 
done in other cases, I caused him to be connected with 
me by a piece of thin wire. One end of the wire was 
twisted around my right wrist and the other end 
around his left. The coil itself remained slack. Thus 
connected we started on our errand of search. From 
time to time the wire was drawn taut and it cut into 
our wrists with the force I exercised in pulling iny 
subject along; but, as far as possible, I avoided actually 
touching his hand with my own. After leaving the 
Unter den Linden we turned into a narrow street and 
then into the Emperor William's stables. I went up 
to a corn box and found it locked. For a moment 
I took Mr. Kasson's hand in mine in order to in- 
crease the impression. This done, I moved toward 
Prince Ratibon, and putting my hand in his pocket I 
fetched out the key of the box, which I opened and in- 
side, among the corn, I discovered the hidden tgg. The 
tgg and its contents were afterward presented to the 
Crown Princess of Germany as an Easter gift for the 
kindergarten, in which Her Imperial Highness takes 



THE RESURRECTION. 



123 



so deep an interest." — Stuart C. Cumberland. (Nine- 
teenth Century.) 

And yet notwithstanding all the gifts of Mr. Bishop 
and Mr. Cumberland, murderers go undiscovered, 
victims unavenged and public justice unaided. There is 
no court record of this psychic aid in its public func- 
tions, but it is because of the carnal obsession of courts, 
juries and public functions generally. If angels were 
as plentiful in Wall street as snow flakes what 
chance would they have of knocking through broker's 
skulls ? 

The Nineteenth Century, after citing a large num- 
ber of well authenticated cases of mind-reading, con- 
tains this : 

"A permanent magnet brought into a room will throw 
any surrounding iron into a similar condition. Similarly 
we may conceive that the vibration of molecules of brain 
stuff may be communicated to an intervening medium, 
and so pass from one brain to another with correspond- 
ing impressions. Further advances along the lines of re- 
search here indicated, may necessitate a modification of 
that general view of the relation of mind to matter, to 
which modern science has long been gravitating." 

It may not be brain stuff that vibrates, but ether. 
We have seen blind men sit down before pianos, spread 
their fingers and strike the chords instantly. How do 
they know their location without having previously 
touched the instrument ? And we have seen them hail 



124 



ELECTRICITY AND 



their friends at a distance who were perfectly motion- 
less and noiseless. 



''A month ago or so, the wife of Jacob Berean, of 
Marlborough, New York, had her right leg amputated. 
A week or so ago she complained that two of the toes 
overlapped each other, and that it pained her dreadfully. 
Unknown to her, Mr. Berean dug the leg up and' 
straightened out the toes. He then went home and 
asked his wife how she felt, when she told him that she 
suffered no more." — A clipping. 



"Curtis McGregor, of Caddo Peak, who had his arm 
amputated, used to sit up and walk around the room, 
but complained from the first of a pain in the ampu- 
tated hand, and he declared that bugs were in it. This 
continued until the eighth day after the amputation, 
when friends exhumed and examined the amputated arm,, 
which had been buried in a box, with a cloth wrapped 
about it. A large bug was found in the hand as stated 
by Mr. McGregor." — Waco News, Texas. 

George Crooke speaks of a "nerve atmosphere. '' 
Swedenborg saw a conflagration by clairvoyance some 
hundred miles distant while it was occurring. Let it 
be repeated — this is wireless, nerve fluid telegraphy. 

SOCIAL HYPNOTISM. 

This law is illustrated in domestic life. The man, 
the natural head of the household, who maintains his 
centrality of character, becomes the absolute master. 



THE RESURRECTION. 125 

for weal or for woe, of his wife and children. They 
cleave unto him; they are passive to him in conduct. 
The old civil laws, recognizing this power, would not 
allow a wife to testify either for or against her hus- 
band. It is a hypnotism without ''suggestion." The 
head of a family has moral responsibility, not only to 
command, according to right and intelligence, but to 
keep from destroying the individualities of the family 
and from weakening their character by absorption of 
their force into his. The wife and the children should 
be allowed free, unhampered, unawed growth. Ob- 
serve the crushing influence of the stronger person in 
a case of love. How many women have gone with 
faltering heart, revolting judgment and leaden feet to 
the matrimonial altar under a dreadful nightmare, a 
fatal fascination or thralldom, which has needed the 
strong will of a third person to break. 

It is an earnest question, prompted by accepted phe- 
nomena, whether morbid states of mind, mania for vice 
and crime, are always original with the individual, or 
sometimes resultant from the surging of a psychic en- 
ergy outside of him that is laden with these qualities. 
The victim of all vices, more illustratively venereal vice, 
may be the subject of spiritual influences, or even in- 
organic sexual principles that are entirely objective to 
himself. A remark by Paracelsus was that ''the air 
is so full of devils, that there is not as much as a hair's 
breadth between them.'' This would be literally true 
if atoms were devils. We all silently affect one an- 



126 ELECTRICITY AND 

other in character and inherent states of mmd and 
morals. 

"I really do believe there are strange influences in the 
air sometimes; Hke seeds of plants blown by the wind to 
places where they best take root and fructify; so the 
unseen yet living organic influences of hatred or love, 
joy or sorrow may be, for all we know, broadcast in the 
seemingly clear ether, ready to sink sooner or later into 
hearts prepared to receive and germinate them." — Marie 
Corelli. 

Disorganization of bodily health may be due from 
this social principle instead of the so-called germs of 
disease. Many of these proclaimed germ theories are 
conjectural. The atmosphere is made the scapegoat of 
many ills. Objective social conditions may affect one's 
health. ''Outing" in the country is beneficial to the 
health sometimes, not from the change of air, but by 
escaping from the disturbed or oppressive social mag- 
netism, allowing the spirit to revive without the ex- 
haustion of its powers by others, or their overbearing 
repressions. There can be an unseen germless social 
element of society that produces discord in body and 
mind. In cities half of the people are sent prematurely 
to their graves by this psychic pressure and attrition, 
without apparent physical cause. They say they re- 
quire "a change of air.'' They recover by isolation, 
but their recovery is rather a rest from magnetic con- 
tests with unseen spiritual aggression ; for the air of 
the country is no better than the air of the city, even in 
its cleanest parts where most people get what they call 



THE RESURRECTION. 127 

malaria, but which is, Hkely, nerve poison from their 
own effete nerve and brain matter and also from yet 
undiscovered nervous diseases of society. The air 
sweeps across both city and country ahke in the same 
hour. Country people often get the same benefit by 
coming to the city. And where there is not the off en- 
siveness of a crowd, there may be in domestic circles 
magneto-mental antipathies that silently and secretly 
consume. Public authorities, to save taxes for asylums 
and hospitals, should promote cheap travel. The trol- 
ley cars in cities save millions of dollars in that way. 
Social cohesion is not moral force alone; it is also 
a mechanical, involuntary force, like gravitation. Soul 
magnetism is the cernent of society as attraction is 
the cement of the physical universe. Strike out of man- 
kind this magnetism, leaving men as independent en- 
tities, then whatever their moral svmpathies, teachings 
or languages are, society would disintegrate and man- 
kind would die out. There can be no completely in- 
dependent individuality. There can be immoral re- 
flections from the earth as from the society. Different 
soils and exhalations will effect different moral con- 
ditions as well as different physical conditions. Mental 
diseases and conditions are sometimes endemic. 

A PERSONAL DEVIL. 

The human system is sometimes made a funnel or 
channel of inorganic and outward psychic element. 



128 ELECTRICITY AND 

This may account for intense predispositions in some 
people that are not hereditary to them, as becoming 
"possessed of the devil." 



''If there is one thing palpable on the face of the 
Scriptures it is the personal existence of a diabolical spirit 
of Satan, with whom Christ personally fought, and in 
whose power the world now lies." — Rev. George F. 
Pentecost. 



The personal devil is nothing more nor less than the 
objective and confluent badness of all mankind, living 
or dead, conveyed by this social magnetic fluid or uni- 
versal medium. It is an outward force besetting us, 
and therefore the principle is the same as a personal 
devil, only it has been wrongly named by our fore- 
fathers, as they named it witchcraft, using the term as 
an allegory. The serpent that tempted Eve was prob- 
ably an outward endemic influence, or the cumulated 
badness of the race; Adam and Eve being only the 
allegories, or the first expressions of history. A per- 
sonal devil is, of course, inconsistent with a personal 
God. It is only a name for an impersonal evil in- 
fluence. God would not create a sentient personal an- 
tagonist and enemy to all his own graciousness. We 
ourselves aggregately have made the devil. If a 
personal devil has existed coevally with an independent 
God, then God is not omnipotent nor even a creator. 
Man, himself, through his free agency, fell. Much is 



THE RESURRECTION. 129 

laid to the devil, as well as to God, that should be 
charged back to mankind. 

Under this law of the materialization of souls any 
like parts or faculties of souls have a natural affinity 
and material cohesion with similar outward elements. 
Where one is endowed with a highly developed faculty, 
it draws like influences from invisible sources and be- 
comes a controlling passion. The musician augments 
his faculty from the musical beings around him, dead 
or alive; vice appetite is augmented by the vice and 
appetites of objective psychic influences, not from in- 
ward influences nor yet from imitation, but by induc- 
tion. All know the mysterious power of appetites ; 
they appetize the very will itself; the will is fatally 
prostrate before some overpowering outside influence, 
unless warned against it. 

It is a familiar fact that a household often awake to- 
gether, either very early or late, in the morning, with- 
out traceable cause. 

And why does nature demand, when affection is in 
operation, close contact and presence of two souls? 
All forces diminish according to the square of the dis- 
tance. This appears to be a law in soul force. When 
old friends meet there is a grasp of hands ; a shock of 
psychic force is discharged by each one into the other. 
What kind of a father and mother would they be who, 
saying they love their children, yet never touch nor 
embrace them? Love demands contact and will not 
tolerate distance. 



130 ELECTRICITY AND 



PUBLIC MAGNETISM. 

We know that it is almost impossible to enjoy a play 
or a speech in a small audience. That is because there 
is less aggregate volume of soul to act and to react 
upon and arouse the individual soul. The greater 
enthusiasm of a large crowd over a small one is pro- 
verbial. Sometimes where the mass is large it upsets 
all judgment and carries the strongest intellect away 
into mechanical demonstrations. This is illustrated 
in religious, musical and political excitements ; in war, 
public fears, panics and riots. This mental infection 
probably would not occur if all individual minds were 
absolutely isolated. Some influences are material in- 
fections of mind, like the infection of diseases. Bishop 
Buer said, **A nation may go mad the same as an 
individual." How can that be unless the individuals 
are connected? A New York newspaper recently 
spoke of a man becoming enchanted, ruined and thus 
killed by the '^magnetic, overawing influence of an 
opulent and powerful New York family;" and his 
decline was a mystery to the physicians. A leading 
journal recently avowed its belief in ''an electric cur- 
rent in large masses of men which leads them on 
automatically to riot." The same paper announces 
"contagious insanity" and the theory of public excite- 
ments ''sweeping from one individual to another like 
contagious diseases." 



THE RESURRECTION. 131 

Some holidays will, without traceable cause, be in 
diflferent years differently observed by the community. 
One Christmas will be merry and noisy and another 
will be quiet, universally, so much so as to strike the 
attention of every observer. One Easter Sunday will 
be observed with floral extravagance over the whole 
land, and without any conventional agreement, sign or 
apparent cause, while another will be as strikingly 
simple. At one spring-time one flower will be the 
fashion and another spring-time another flower will 
appear everywhere, and florists will declare that they 
cannot account for the popular fad. There will be no 
apparent cause for the universality of these social 
whims. Communities are spontaneously, silently, mys- 
teriously animated and directed as one individual in 
his humors and conduct. How does this happen with- 
out conventional agreement or notice except that a 
community of mind is ethereally connected? Acci- 
dental concurrence of a million individuals could no.t 
happen. Fads will not set in simultaneously through- 
out a nation, like epidemics, unless there is a connec- 
tion between the people. 

It is a very noticeable fact to travelers that towns 
possess an individualized mental character exactly as 
men bear personal traits and moods. Whether this 
pervading sentiment that is in a community comes of 
involuntary imitation and moral example of one lead- 
ing person, or from mechanical inoculation is a 
question. Some towns have a style of business thrift 



132 ELECTRICITY AND 

and practice, others are indolent. Some are studious 
and cold, others are impulsive and rollicking. Some 
are noted for amours; others are pure. Some are 
especially distinguished for religion ; some for temper- 
ance, architecture, floriculture, travels, diversions, 
dress, horses, literature, etc. In short, of all the senti- 
ments and impulses in the individual mind it can be 
seen that communities take them on. Are the har- 
monies of a mass of the people the result of mere 
isolated and accidental matching of the individuals, 
of voluntary imitation, or of magnetic contact and 
induction as gases and fluids mingle? 

VARIOUS ETHERIC PHENOMENA. 

A boy remains asleep on the morning of Independ- 
ence Day amid all the racket of cannon and fire- 
crackers, but the mere calling of his name by a comrade 
awakens him instantly. Is that a sympathetic force 
penetrating through distance to the sensorium? In 
jurisprudence respect is given by appellate courts to 
verdicts rendered by juries because the juries have 
confronted the witnesses themselves ; and the appellate 
court knows that it cannot get the whole truth by 
''reading the cold pages'' of the report. The judges 
have been accustomed to call it the ''manner'' of the 
witness that produces the true effect upon juries. It is 
probably not the manner alone but rather the unseen 
magnetic transmission of the truth, involuntarily, from 



THE RESURRECTION, 133 

the mind of the witness to the minds of the court and 
the jury. They peer through his verbal testimony into 
his inner chamber of intent by this etheric or electric 
induction, or mental X-ray. 

The common phenomenon of the expression of the 
eye has not been given full weight. Notice that when 
we are speaking to human beings and brutes they look 
squarely into the eye, not the mouth whence the sound 
and motion of the words proceed. But there is abso- 
lutely no change of form, feature or molecule in the 
structure or substance of the eye itself. We do not 
catch the full meaning of the delivery from any 
physiognomical law we have learned; it is soul in- 
ducting into soul its hidden meaning. There is some- 
thing there besides molecular change or movement in 
the substance of the eye ; there is an unseen stream of 
truth and fact, as substantial or material as a stream 
of water or current of air or of electricity. 

A clerk who had served in a criminal court for thirty 
years said that he was satisfied that juries and judges 
are influenced involuntarily and mechanically by out- 
side public opinion, the expression of which they have 
neither heard nor read; influenced directly, with no 
apparent communication, during a case. 

The Cleveland Herald records the case of a corpse 
being left at the Chicago Morgue for identification, 
and when about to be sent to Potter's field, an appari- 
tion appeared and stated that the corpse was his body 
and also stated the circumstances of the death and 



134 ELECTRICITY AND 

that his name was "Charlie LaCroix, of Dunnington, 
New Brunswick," and that Father Condat would claim 
the body. The Coroner, not knowing that there was 
any such person, telegraphed to Father Condat, acting 
on the instructions of the apparition, and all of the 
statements of the ghost turned out to be true. That 
these things are not occurring everywhere is no reason 
for believing they never occur at all. When the single 
telegraph wire was first laid through Central New 
York, the writer of this passing under it during a 
winter's storm in the year 1849, heard all the machinery 
of a cotton factory fifteen miles distant. From that 
none would have predicted the telephone of forty years 
after. 

The Brooklyn Daily Eagle speaks of social epidemics 
in different parts of the country, the separate instances 
having no apparent connection with each other, such 
as grave-robbing, suicides, bank defalcations, mur- 
ders, incendiarism, etc. 

The St. James Gazette reports that Mr. Irving 
Bishop, blindfolded, found a pin after traversing three 
or four streets holding by a piano wire the man who 
had hidden the pin, and that he found it inserted in a 
window sash on an upper balcony of a hotel. 

"J. F. S., in the New York Times, states that he 
awoke himself one night while dreaming of his son 
who was in a distant city with the expression, "God 
have mercy upon him !" at the very instant when the 
son was helping an old lady from a burning building. 



THE RESURRECTION, 135 

He also dreamed at another time of seeing a friend 
ascend into the heavens at the time when that friend 
was dying. 

"Mr. Stuart Cumberland, the mind reader, has been 
trying his gift upon certain members of the House of 
Commons, in the smoking room of that institution. 
He asked Mr. Gladstone to think of some number, and 
after this was done Mr. Cumberland guessed that it was 
366; this guess was correct. Another distinguished per- 
son thought of the number 41,049, which Mr. Cumber- 
land guessed also. He made no mistakes in the series 
of experiments." — Harpers Weekly. 

School teaching is more wearisome than an equiva- 
lent of purely intellectual effort in solitude, because 
there is the objective, resistive, mental magnetism of 
a multitude to overcome, the same as in muscular 
wrestling. 

The writer of this went directly and immediately to 
the homestead and grave of his dearest friend, in a 
town hundreds of miles away, without any knowledge 
of their location, and without the intervention of any 
other grave or house, precisely as though guided by 
angelic monition. It was completely miraculous unless 
by spirit law. 

WHAT PROPELS THE BLOOD. 

The theory that the magnetism in the oxygen and 
the iron particles of the bleod with their polarity is 



136 ELECTRICITY AND 

as much the cause of the blood circulation as the mus- 
cular pumping of the heart, is worth examining. It is 
doubtful if the fibrous strength of the heart is sufficient 
alone for so much mechanical force, although it is true 
that there is some contractile power in the heart which 

\ is received from and allied with the magnetic power 
of the air which is attracting and repelling between 
the positive red blood and the negative venous blood, 
precisely and mechanically as in the electric motor. 

The ethereal soul, stored in the brain and nervous 
system, is probably obtained from the breath of life in 
a manner illustrated in the accompanying diagram of 
one of the myriads of air cells in the lungs. 

The diagram of one air cell and one capillary vein 
represents, generally, the circulatory and respiratory 
systems, operated by the oxygen's magnetism in the 

^ outside air. The oxygen is the only magnetic gas. On 
the left are the dark corpuscles, in the vein, with the 
life principle of the oxygen taken out of them by the 
absorption of the body. By their negative condition 
they are attracted to the positive property of the 
oxygen in their air cells, and are there charged with 
positive electricity which repels them, under the 
familiar principle that like poles repel and unlike at- 
tract; and as they cannot pass back through the vein 
to the right ventricle valve of the heart, the valve 
opening inward, they are forced by electric repulsion 
through the right auricle valve of the heart, which 
opens outward, to the tissues and nerve fluid ; the heart 




/ t lu 



THE RESURRECTION. 137 

being a rhythmic regulator of the magnetic force that 
comes to it through the phrenic nerve from the brain. 

The working of electricity is by both attraction and 
repulsion. This is, at once, another proof of its fluidic 
and its soul-sustaining nature. Positive electricity at- 
tracting, charges the object attracted with its own 
positiveness and then repels it. Thus the circulation 
of the blood and the respiration of the lungs furnish 
a complete prototype of the electrical dynamo and 
motor. 

In the process of breathing, the oxygen that goes 
into the air cells with the atmosphere attracts or is 
attracted through the walls of the air cells, by the 
iron corpuscles of the blood, each of which is a mag- 
net. The molecules of the blood, being larger than the 
pores in the walls of the air cells, cannot pass from 
the capillary veins through those walls into the cells, 
while the atoms of the oxygen can pass through the 
walls into the blood. The oxygen is found in the 
blood for a ''considerable time" after it leaves the 
lungs. Only the oxygen gas is attracted through the 
walls of the cells into the blood, while the non-mag- 
netic nitrogen of the air stays in the cells and is expired 
with the breathing. It is one of the many dogmatic 
canons of physics, many of which have been over- 
thrown, that the heart is the propeller of the blood. 
This is probably not entirely so. If it aids in the cir- 
culation at all it may be but auxiliary, preventing, by 
its valves, a back flow or regurgitation, and deriving 



138 ELECTRICITY AND 

its regularity of pulsations from the unknown law of 
nervous rhythm and impulse in common with the rest 
of nature. The heart has no volition; it is not an 
animal nor an engine. The soul does not inhabit it. 
With the rest of the system it receives its impulse 
from the hand of the Almighty, not directly and im- 
mediately applied to it as an organ, but by the elec- 
trical agency as applied through the atmosphere. The 
blood is propelled by the cosmic force exterior to the 
body. There is no inherent, or self-living, in the heart 
or body. A repetition of this principle, in new dress 
may be pardonable. The iron corpuscles of the venous 
blood, coming back through the capillaries that sur- 
round the air cells of the lungs, have been negatived 
by use throughout the body and are attracted thither 
by the positive electricity that is in the air cells. There 
the corpuscles are again converted into positive mag- 
nets, becoming revitalized red blood, and then are 
repelled but they cannot return by the venous duct, the 
way they came, because in the duct is the valve of the 
right ventricle closed against their return, and they 
find their course toward the least resistance, which is 
through the pulmonary vein to the right auricle, where 
the valve opens the other way for a free passage and 
then closes, preventing the back flow of the blood. 
When the left auricle is full of revitalized blood its 
valve closes, perhaps not automatically, but by the re- 
active pressure of blood from the whole body ; and the 
arterial blood is carried to the left ventricle and along 



THE RESURRECTION. 139 

and around the whole system quite as much by the 
suction of the magnetism in the lungs through the 
venous system and through the anastomoses, as by 
the propulsion of the heart. It is said that the proof 
of the pumping power of the heart is the fact of the 
left ventricle being larger than the right from its 
superior work and muscular exercise. This is a good 
argument, but it does not show that the heart uses all 
the force, or that its fibrous and tensile muscular 
strength is great enough for the necessary power. 
The cause of the left ventricle being enlarged may be 
from the extra force used in resisting the bodily pres- 
sure back upon it. As a regulator the heart does work 
enough in resisting sudden impulses of breathing, ex- 
citement and exertion. 

Dr. A. R. Stevens, of Philadelphia, has remarked 
that electricity is abstracted from the blood in the 
arteries and stored in the corpus callosum. We know 
that organ to be the citadel of the consciousness, that 
it crowns and joins together within itself all the sen- 
sory and motor nerves of the entire system. Why 
should they converge in this one central soft mass 
unless there is located the mind or soul ? 



\ 



"It was formerly thought that the red blood cells 
were merely pushed through the blood vessels, but now 
we know that they pass through the vessels by an in- 
herent movement of their own.'" — Dr. Wm. M. Moser. 



I40 ELECTRICITY AND 



VITALITY. 

What do histologists call the substance that is neither 
blood nor oxygen, but is the result of the two just 
before it is formed into the tissue? Has there been 
any conversion of the oxygen's magnetism into nerve 
fluid ? But little nitrogen passes the walls of the cells 
into the blood; on the other hand, nearly as much 
nitrogen is expired as is inspired, and carbonic acid 
gas diffuses from the venous blood through the cell 
walls into the cells and takes the place of the oxygen 
that has left the cell cavity, through the cell walls 
into the blood, carrying its electricity with it, adding 
impetus to the onward current of the blood and giving 
force to the heart. The atmosphere and the lungs thus, 
by magnetic attraction and repulsion, aid the heart in 
circulation. There being no valves in the lung pass- 
ages, there is no contractile or forcing power to push 
the air through these millions of cell walls into the 
blood capillaries. If there were, the nitrogen also 
would be forced through the walls into the blood 
as freely as the oxygen. Thus it is clear that the 
oxygen is attracted through the walls, or membranes 
of the cells, by its well known magnetic affinity with 
the iron in the blood. It is the_vitality of the atmos- 
phere ; the direct life supply, "the breath of life." 
There is life, soul, spirit in the atmosphere. It gives 
soul to the blood and circulation also. 



THE RESURRECTION. 



141 



"As it (ozone) is evolved by electricity and also by 
chemical action, it would seem almost certain that it 
would be a constant ingredient of our atmosphere.'* — 
Dr. A. H. Cutting. 

The accompanying cut is offered as an illustration 
of the theory of bJood-propulsion by the atmosphere. 
It illustrates one set of the thousands of minute air- 
cells and blood-capillaries in the lungs. 

A is an air duct from the outer world to B, which 
is an air cell. C is a capillary vein bringing the cor- 
puscles of venous blood, which is negative, electrically, 
its positive quality having been left in the system by 
circulation. The magnetic oxygen in the cell B being 
positive, and the atoms of oxygen passing through 
the wall GG, leaving the nitrogen atoms in 
the cell, the venous corpuscles which are negative, are 
attracted up to GG. Here they become charged with 
positive magnetism of the oxygen and, according to 
the law that like poles repel, they are forced away. 
But according to this secret rhythmical law, the right 
ventricle of the heart, E, is closed, and therefore the 
pressure escapes with the arterialized corpuscles 
through the capillary artery D, out through the right 
auricle valve of the heart F. Thus t he elec tricity^ or 
magnetism of the atmosphere is the propeller of the 
blood, not the heart, the heart being the mere regulator. 
The right auricle of the heart being more muscularly 
developed than the left, is cited as an argument that 



142 ELECTRICITY AND 

that auricle is the "pumper." It is more probable that 
this muscular development is caused by resistance to 
the back flow of the blood. 

All rhythm, animal pulsations, attraction and chemi- 
cal affinity are the direct application of the hand and 
will of God. Wherever there is an obstruction in a flow 
of force, or substance, there is intermittence, like the 
flutter of a leaf and the folds of a flag in the breeze 
or the waves of grain fields. So the valvular action 
of the heart is but the rhythmic interruption of the 
atmosphere's magnetic force upon the blood as the 
water's pressure is interrupted in the hydraulic ram. 
I We cannot discover any origin of force in the rnuscles 
\ of the heart, but we do see an origin of force in the 
i magnetic oxygen in the lung cells. 



THE ELECTRIC VOICE. 

It is a worthy proposition that in the voice there is 
an electric as well as a pneumatic phenomenon. Prob- 
ably there goes with the powerful notes of the canary 
bird a wave or current of electricity as well as breath 
from the vocal organs. The telephone speaks without 
air or anything like lungs. One human voice is more 
stirring or pungent than another, and this in propor- 
tion to its magnetism. Queens of song have not only 
articulation, but their tones come from the whole mind 
and nervous system; they are ingrained in character 
and are in every cell of the brain. The vocal charms 



THE RESURRECTION. 



143 



of a prima donna will affect others in accordance with 
her temperament of mind and soul. Many have vocal 
endowments without the souls to use them. Many a 
rich voice lacks irapressiveness. 



144 ELECTRICITY AND 



CHAPTER VI. - 

THE SUBSTANCE OF LIFE PRINCIPLE. 

The materiality of electricity — Tesla and Lodge — The 
energy of matter is God — Hypnotism, suggestive and fluidic 
— Spontaneous generation — Sex in atoms and chemistry — 
The resurrection in the etheric principle. 

The essence, origin and substance of electricity have 
never been seen, and until recently have been the sub- 
jects of much conjecture. Men have been satisfied 
with prosecuting its effects only, as they are in investi- 
gating the activities of the soul without enquiring what 
the soul is. Our scientists and physicists generally will 
not go any further than they can see. They think that 
their qualitative and quantitative yard sticks and 
scales are the be-all and the end-all. They say that 
electricity is not a thing. People now look up to the 
pulley on the trolley cars and think no farther, ex- 
cept to say that it is no thing that forces the cars. 

''And this electricity is as rigid as steel. It cannot be 
compressed nor condensed, yet is thousands of millions 
of times lighter than the lightest air of the mountain 
tops. It is everywhere in the universe, in the earth, in 



THE RESURRECTION. 145 

the sea, in the air and in the vast abyss above the air/*— 
Clipping. 

*'I therefore contend that all things were made out of 
electricity, which is not only an invisible and impon- 
derable substance, but a primeval and^ternal matter.'' — 
J. B. Dodds. 



Physicists are ready to deny the materiality of elec- 
tricity. They tell us that it is a ''force" or a "mode of 
motion." There they stop, and their earth is flat. In- 
^/ stead of being a motion of successive molecules and 
A atoms, electricity acts as if it were s omethin g gassijogr 
/ \ between and tl^jugh the atomsand molecules. Com- 
• mon sense and experiment tell us that the nerve work, 

the nerve axis and the telegraph wires are channels 
for the transmission of a quantity of substance from 
one place to another, having a tendency to leave minus 
at one place and plus at another place. It is a current . 
o f stuff , and there is always a counter-current to re- V/ 
supply that which is taken away. We treat electricity 
precisely and in every detail as we do any other ma- 
terial power — steam, streams of water, pneumatic force 
in tubes, etc. No motion can be imparted without 
1 passage and transit. If the electric force were not a 
substance, but merely imparted motion to molecules of 
\ matter, objective to itself, those molecules in the mat- 
! ter would have to m.ove some — be changed in location 
— and they would all be eventually displaced. But 
they do not move any more than the pipe does that 



146 ELECTRICITY AND 

contains the stream of water or steam, or compressed 
air; the wire always remains. A train of cars starts 
with a jerk. We say that it is material steam that 
does it. But when electricity starts a train with a jerk, 
some say that it is not material. Force is from a thing 
in motion. Because we cannot see nor chemically 
analyze that thing is no proof that that thing it not 
material. Our chemical science is not completed. Al- 
though we do not understand the substance of ma- 
teriality of electricity, nevertheless it is matter, because 
we can store it and we can put it in a ten-ton car full 
of passengers, and it will run that car better than a 
team of horses until it has all run out, just as any 
other substance would run out, and there is no mode 
of motion of the molecules of the machinery. The 
stream of electric fluid will run a factory or loaded 
cars, through a wire not as thick as a pen staff, for 
miles distant from where is was "generated" (gath- 
ered). If the force were from the motion of the 
molecules in the wire that small wire would not have 
the tensile fibrous strength to pull those cars. It 
would break. The more power we want the larger the 
wire, as in a mill flume, a steam boiler or a wind mill. 
The more lights we want the larger must be our en- 
gine at the dynamo. Electric lights are paid for ac- 
cording to the quantity consumed, just the same as gas 
lights are paid for, the amount, in both cases, being 
ascertained through a meter. The stream runs from 
the dynamo along the wire. If it were not a stream of 



THE RESURRECTION. 



147 



substance, but rather an immaterial force, imparting 
agitation to successive molecules, it would radiate its 
force to all molecules in every direction and make con- 
i centric ring waves of force, like the ring waves caused 
^ by throwing a pebble into the water. To regard elec- 
tricity as matter is deducibJe, from all its phenomena, 
in our use of terms in mechanical use and in its effects. 
It will cut a two-foot tree in two like a cleaver and 
plow holes in the ground ''as big as a barrel/' If it is 
immaterial force imparted to molecules, why is it con- 
fined like the edge of a knife or the point of a plough? 
The scientist who says that it is not matter has missed 
his calling, for he cannot realize an axiom or compre- 
hend a first principle. When we are answered that 
we do not know what matter is, we reply, of course 
not ; but electricity is what matter is, whatever it is. 

As to the forces behind electricity we w^ll have to 
admit that they are the presence and body of the ever- 
living God. He is somQ.where and with something. 
He might as well be with electricity as anywhere else, 
with anything else. If electricity be not a thing, an 
object, but rather a mere mode of motion, induced by 
friction, or erosion of something else, then mind force 
may be nothing and may be the mere result of bodily 
friction, ceasing with the cessation of the body. But 
the theory matches better with all phenomena that 
electricity is not generated by friction, but is a material^ 
substance gathered from space, diverted^from^Jts 
quiescent status, by another force, to the channel of 




148 ELECTRICITY AND 

its affinity, its. flow, its current, and depending upon 
the force required to divert it precisely as pneumatic 
or hydraulic force. 



"I adhere to the idea that there is a thing which we 
have been in the habit of calling electricity. The ques- 
tion is, what is the thing; or, what, of all things the ex- 
istence of which we know, have we the best reason to 
call electricity? We know that it acts like an incom- 
pressible fluid, and that there must be a constant quan- 
tity of it in nature; that it can be neither produced nor 
^ destroyed; and, what is more important, the electro- 
magnetic theory of light and all facts observed teach us 
that electric and ether phenomena are identical. The 
idea at once suggests itself, therefore, that electricity 
might be called ether. In fact, this view has, in a cer- 
tain sense, been advanced by Dr. Lodge." — From Prof. 
Tesia; Electrical World, July 11, 1891. 

^' Electricity is a form of ether or a mode of ethereal 1 
manifestation. . . . Few things in physical science 
appear to me to be more certain than that which has 
long been called electricity is a form, or rather a mode ^ 
of manifestation, of the ether. . . . The term elec- 
tricity will have to go. . . . That which is now to 
be investigated is not the nature of electricity but the 
nature of ether. . . . Electricity may be possibly a -1 
form of matter; it is not a form of energy." .. . 
Electricity behaves like a perfect and all-permeating 
fluid. I by no means assert that it is such a fluid or 
liquid; I only assert the undoubted fact that it behaves 
like one. . . . Positjye and negative electricity to- 
gedier make up the ether. .""". . Gravitation lind co- 
hesion are to be looked for in the ether . . . ong 
continuous substance filling all space, which can vibrate 
as light, which can be sheared into positive and negative 



THE RESURRECTION. 



149 



electricity; which, i n whirls, constitutes matter and 
which transmits by continuity, and not by impact, every 
action and relation of which matter is capable." — Dr. 
Oliver J. Lodge, University College, Liverpool. 

The answer of scientists and of electricians vv^ho are 
not scientists, that the motive power of electricity is 
by a ''mode of motion" might as well not be given at 
all. They might as well say ''Boo !" They have 
never seen any such motion and they cannot describe 
it. When they are asked, "A mode of motion of 
what?'' they shrug their shoulders like Mark Twain's 
jumping frog that did not jump. Now, there cannot 
be a motion but of a thing that moves. What is it 
that moves between the soft copper wire, or "brush," 
and the axletree of the motor under the trolley car? 
We use this familiar object as a most astonishing illus- 
tration of the physical force of electricity — a force 
passing from a most fragile conduit and driving a 
ponderous weight by a minimum of leverage. A thing 
cannot be moved in space unless some other thing gets 
behind it and pushes it and follows it up, more or less, 
by a transit through space. There is no motion of the 
copper wire or the copper brush; they are stationary, 
and not a molecule of the substance is displaced or 
worn out. It is by no mode of motion of these soft 
fibres, atoms or molecules through which the electric 
car is made to crash along ; and yet there is some ma- 
terial thing passing between them and the motor of ; 
the electric car. Some have explained the force of 



I50 ELECTRICITY AND 

electricity as that of imparting a force to the first 
billiard ball in a long row that projects the last one 
from its place. This is a short-headed illustration be- 
cause there must be some transit, however little, in 
space, of the first ball and because the last ball moves 
by its own momentum. But in the trolley car there 
is no transit whatever of the molecules of the wire; 
they in themselves can give no progressive influence 
or impetus to an object or weight. There is some 
real substantial thing pushing the trolley car mo- 
tor. Neither the copper wire nor the hnish is 
pushing or pulling. What is it pushing the motor? 
Between the magnet of the dynamo and that of the 
motor there is an absolute and complete cut-off 
mechanically. By accepting or reviving the old theory 
that electricity is a passing fluid — the inelastic ether of 
Tesla — all becomes clear and consistent. The ether, 
of which electricity is a motion, is a universal, incorp- 
pressible fluid. It has been compared to an ocean of 
water. It is easily displaced, but, like water, not in- 
stantly. If it is matter at all it has inertia and momen- 
tum like any other matter. It has a rotary, independent ^ 
energy, in and by itself, like all other matta;^ The/ 
weight to be removed or the resistance to be overcome, 
at a distance, requires an equivalent or greater force 
at the power house. If a hundred cars aggregating a 
thousand tons are to be moved though one wire, then 
a thousand tons, or more for wastage, must be applied 
at the dynamo in the power house. And this, too, mar- 



THE RESURRECTION. 



151 



velous as it is, without any physical connection with 
the cars, by shaft, cog wheel or belt, as would be the 
case in any ordinary application of mechanical power. 
Between the magnet and the armature there is a 
mechanical vacuum, in which this terrible ether is 
<3ispl?-ced from its cosmic balance, its inertia in this 
apparent vacuum resisting the steam engine like iron 
or any other ponderous weight. This ether, having 
been displaced from its cosmic equilibrium, finds an 
outlet, like water, with the equivalent of force that I 
displaced it. How it hugs the copper wire as a con- 
ductor or medium is an unknown principle, the dis- 
covery of which is not pertinent to this argument. It 
may be illustrated by the force of a whirlpool of water 
surrounded by still water, or like the cyclone of air 
with its devastation like the scathing of an iron bom- 
bardment surrounded by the still summer air. If we 
cannot understand the rotary energy of the ether, no 
more can we understand the momentum of the whirl- 
pool or the whirlwind. It is said in electrical science 
that the progress of the magnetic and electric currents I 

is bj^3_spiral, or cork-screw rotation. That whirling, X 

as^well^jis the nebulous phenomena, seems to be the / ^ 
method of the Almighty's power. 

The reason why the molecules of the soft copper 
wire do not give way by the reaction of this great force 
is because this adamantine ether reacts upon its cosmic 
mass as an abutment or base. These mechanical prin- 
ciples are self-evident and cannot be ignored. They 




152 ELECTRICITY AND 

show that this ether, whose motion is electrical phe- 
nomena, is a substance — matter unatomized, and a 
divine energy. If this analysis is not clear, charge it 
to Lodge and Tesla, who say that electricity is ether in 
motion ; to Jevons, who says that ether is adamantine ; 
and to Beecher, who said that energy is God. Put 
these three assumptions together and see how ether, 
revolving spirally, can of itself attract the armature 
of a motor, like sending a living thing from one place 
to another to perform volitional service. The energy 
of God is there; it is the same energy and presence 
that swells the atoms and molecules of vapor in the 
steam boiler or that which expands from the micro- 
scopic cell of each independent plant, into the melon or 
flower. This energy, everywhere, we need not try to 
comprehend nor gainsay. There is a theology in this 
that scientists will have to come to, and stop shrugging 
their shoulders at it with their "mode of motion." 
They might as well say that the force in a steam chest 
is not a thing, but a mode of motion, as to say that 
the force in a storage battery is not a fluid, but is a 
mode of motion. 

There is no such thing, in the abstract, as attraction. 
Professor Lodge says, 'The only way to move a thing 
is to get behind it and push it.'' This is not only true 
according to the axiomatic instincts of the mind, but it 
is true experimentally. And it is according to this 
axiom that we may at once illustrate electrical force, 
the etheric substance of the soijl and of all primal 



A 



REPELS 




ATTRACTS 



B 



PUSHING N 



S PULLING 



THE RESURRECTION, 



153 



cosmic energy, which may reverently be called the will 
of God. A horse does not pull a wagon ; his shoulders 
push upon the collar, the collar pushes on the inside 
of the trace-hook, the trace-hook pushes on the inside 
of the whiffle-tree ring, and the whiffle-tree ring pushes 
on the back of the whiffle-tree hook, the whiffle-tree 
on the back of the king-bolt, and thus the w^agon is 
gushed. The magnet does not attract the armature, 
but the rotating ether passes behind the armature push- 
ing it up to the magnet. So in the leather trace pulling 
the wagon, the rotating atoms of the leather push, one 
another by this mutually interlocking and spiral mo- 
tion. The cork-screw does not pull the cork; its coils 
get behind the cork and push it out. 

The electric car motor is a good and familiar illus- 
tration of the physical materiality of the whirling ether. 
Along this soft copper wire thousands of tons are 
pushed every instant, smashing cars and trucks, or 
tearing asunder great iron bolts and braces and yet not 
an atom nor molecule of the fragile soft wire is dis- 
turbed during years. Now, recognizing the axiom 
that wherever there is a current of force, that current 
is a motion of some real, substantial, material thing 
and assuming that electricity is the ether in motion by 
its everlasting, omnipresent primal energy, we can 
logically deduce the theory, as well as prove it ex- 
perimentally, of a continuous moving material force 
by the accompanying cut. A is a current of electrical 
energy which^ it is universally proved and accepted, 



154 ELECTRICITY AND 

never goes straight like the passage of an arrow, but 
proceeds spirally. This spiral current of a substance 
acts precisely like the blade of a steamboat propeller, 
or a cork-screw, in inconceivable rapidity. Assume 
this spiral to be around the armature of a motor, about 
which passes the innumerable electric wires conducting 
this spiral current. By its revolution in the direction 
of the spiral which always goes clock-wise it will be 
seen that there is a reaction or repulsion like the blade 
of a propeller at N, while at S there is a grip like a 
cork-screw which pulls, or attracts. Now, passing to 
the cut B, which is the armature of the motor upon an 
axle, it will be seen that the direction of the electricity 
being that of the arrows, there is the same repulsion 
at N and pulling at S. When the end of the bar at 
N passes above N and the end of the bar at S passes 
below S the current is cut off by the revolving insulated 
segments in the commutator, and another bar is imme- 
diately presented with the current of force let on in a 
similar manner at the proper instant. These bars are 
as numerous in the commutator and as close together 
as the winding wires. Thus a continuous motion in 
one direction is kept up by alternating let-ons and cut- 
offs of the current. But the current of ether puslies 
and pulls as illustrated by the screws and arrows. 

According to the accompanying cut there cannot be 
any mechanical movement because the grip at the right 
would just equal the repulsion at the left. But take 
half of the armature as in the accompanying cut, which 




-/■ 



/A 







^ 



^ 





THE RESURRECTION. 155 

does not represent fully the mechanism of the electric 
motor, but is simplified to show to the lay reader the 
principle and the facts. When two electrical spiral cur- 
rents go in the same direction they interlock — grip — 
attract like two hooks of steel, and when two currents 
go in different directions they repel like the blades of 
a propeller against water. An electric current going 
^rom always repels, going toward always attracts. Re- 
ferring to the accompanying cut it will be seen that the 
current to and around the magnets is directed one way 
only, but as to the armature the direction alternates, 
the power is let into the commutator at segment B and 
traverses spirally, clockwise, to the end, where, meet- 
ing the current of the magnets going the same way, 
they "cork-screw themselves together" (Parsell), thus 
pulling whatever they are attached to and producing 
mechanical motion. When the arm B has passed its 
magnet, to the right, then segment C having revolved 
with the commutator takes up the power at A and con- 
ducts it along the dotted line to the end and thence 
back around the armature, the reverse of what it was, 
thus reacting against the current at the arrow heads. 
These arms being successively and greatly multiplied, 
as coils of wire, operate by these rapidly alternating 
reversals, keeping up a continuous revolution in one 
direction. 

Thus God's will energizes physical nature through 
His ethereal body as man's will does his flesh and 
blood. 



156 ELECTRICITY AND 

This electrical energy is not "generated" by the 
dynamo, as a creation ; the dynamo at the power house 
only dislodges this ether, with its living energy, from 
its static position. To divert this force into an accept- 
ing medium like the copper wire requires a force at 
the power house in the steam engine exactly equivalent 
to the weight that is moved. The wire is simply the 
road or highway of this force to its destination, the 
road or highway being no guiding or constraining 
part of the force, as is proved by there being no strain 
upon the atoms or molecules of the wire. This tapping 
of the energetic ether is like tapping a hurricane, a 
whirlpool or a waterfall, the function of tapping, which 
is the dynamo not being the creator of the force. There 
is a reaction, it is true, from the motor back to the 
power house, but it is the reaction of the ether against 
its own cosmic mass, which packs all space. The only 
unsolvable mystery is in the affinity and mediumship 
of the wire. This ether — electricity, or omnipresent \ 
divine energy — does its work wherever placed. 

SPEED OF ELECTRICITY ITS FORCE. 

It would be a beautiful and entirely practicable prob- 
lem in mathematics to find out the density of ether by 
a comparison of its speed and power with the speed 
and power of other known masses of matter. Motion 
accounts for all force. The gentle and salubrious 
atmosphere and water become scathing destroyers when 



THE RESURRECTION, 



157 



in motion; the cannon hall is impotent as it lies in its 
magazine, but in motion is terrible. An iron chain , 
hangs limp and harmless, but may be twirled, like the X 
spokes of a wheel, into a solid mass, for energy. So 
with the ether; its motions account for all physical 
phenomena. The summer's zephyr is air in motion at 
five miles an hour. Multiply that speed only twenty 
times it becomes as destructive as a bomibardment or 
an earthquake. The speed of ether being millions of \ 
times faster than the hurricane, may not that speed \ 
with its ascertained power prove the density of ether, j 
and thus demonstrate its materiality and existence? 
From the known speed and force therefrom of elec- * 
tricity could be deduced its specific gravity, and thus 
demonstrate its materiality, assuming electricity to be 
ether. 

The electrical storage battery tends to show that 
electricity is detachable and transmissible, and does its 
work separate from everything else, locally and inde- 
pendently, wherever sent or placed, like a personal 
agent with a sentient will. The storage battery con- ' 
tains some thing in its operation, after having been 
charged by the electrical current, some thing that it 
did not contain before ; a working thing has been put 
into it and left there, separated from its previous place 
and connections. There it stimulates chemical affinity 
and itself is transformed into chemical reaction. The 
replacement of atoms on the plate constituting the mo- 
tive power is only another form of or a continuation of 



^ 



158 ELECTRICITY AND 

the same detached, plus electrical energy. There is 
no more power in the battery than was put into it by 
the electrical charge. Electrical energy, chemical en- 
ergy, the energy of matter, the energy of nature and 
the will of God, are all one and identical 

"Energy is going into the magnet all the time it is 
doing work — energy in some form. Where does it come 
from — gravity? atmosphere? solar rays? earth rays? 
Who can say? It is a great problem worthy of a life- 
time of indefatigable research. It is a microbe and it 
will be discovered, and the discovery will make elec- 
tricity the queen of nature's forces, and steam will be- 
come a dim vision of the dark ages of the past.'*— « 
Electrical Review. 

A microbe is a living thing. We may find it easier to 
comprehend electricity as being a fluid, than how that 
fluid can be transmitted with force through a mechan- 
ical vacuum or cut-oflf. The rotary independent cur- 
rent of air from an electric fan, or any other screw- 
propeller may explain. 



THE RESURRECTION, 159 



CHAPTER VII. 

SPIRITUALISM AND GHOSTS. 

Hypnotism and telepathy are universal — Woman's spirit- 
ualism — The still small voice — Rarefaction of organisms — 
Germs — Ethereal realms — Instinct and intuition — Reflex 
mental force — Panics and stampedes — Transmutations — 
Guardian angels — Mesmeric literature. 

Many say that the cause of the influence of mind 
over another is wholly within the mind of the person 
influenced. This is subjective. Others take the 
ground that when one person so influences another, 
something like a magnetic current goes out — passes — 
from the operator and bears down the mind of the per- 
son influenced. This is called "objective power," be- 
cause it is outside of the person influenced. This was 
Mesmer's theory. The School of Suggestive Hypno- 
tism, led notably by Dr. Bernheim, Professor Donato, 
Professor Charcot, and others, says that there is not an 
outgoing stream, force or fluid, but that one person 
hypnotizes or brings under his influence another when 
that other respects and obeys, of his own accord, the 
suggestion made by the person who influences him. As 
already shown, this essay takes the broadest ground 
against the suggestive theory of hypnotism and for the 



l6o ELECTRICITY AND 

emanative or fluidic theory. The suggestive school ig- 
nores the materiahty of the soul, and from that false 
beginning blunders on. They are idealists. If they 
take the position that the soul is simply an abstract 
sentience — nothing but consciousness — they must give 
up those figures of speech such as will force, will 
power, magnetism, etc., as misleading and unscientific 
terms. There can be neither force, power nor mag- 
netism without material impact of substance. There is 
a so-called moral force, a force of logic, a force of ex- 
ample, the word force being a misnomer, but there can 
be no real objective force that is not material and 
mechanical. Bernheim, Charcot and Donato have 
given us phenomena, but they have not given us phil- 
osophy. Moral and intellectual qualities, even when 
backed by determination, do not have the effect of this 
natural, material, unseen will force that wafts like the 
"rushing of a mighty wind." It is to one man mentally 
what muscular power is to another. It can be innate 
or cultivated by degrees, but it cannot be effectively as- 
sumed. Some men can have it in battery, always 
ready; and to command others they may gather this 
A force from space and send it forth. It forces, guides, 
benumbs or suffuses other brains with its own 
thoughts, suggestions and powers. 

If suggestion only be necessary, that could be made 
by epistle or by a weak-minded person. Neither Bern- 
heim nor Donato has ever shown an instance when a 
simple suggestion has worked any effect without bod- 



THE RESURRECTION. i6i 

ily presence In the first Instance of the operator with 
his subjects; and this fact, this initial personal con- 
tact, proves the fluidic theory just as reasonably as It 
does the suggestive theory. In his half a thousand 
octavo pages Bernheim gives therapeutic cures In the 
hospitals, but they are principally upon passive and ig- 
norant persons. He nowhere even attempts to prove 
that there is no emanative wave substance akin to a 
magnetic current. Was it suggestion and imagination 
that Christ used in his cures, or was it an emanative 
substance that passed out of him ? Dr. Bernheim and 
Professor Donato give us nothing new ; and before de- 
nouncing the fluidic theory they should make some de- 
monstrative proof against it. Here is a specimen of 
Bernheim's reasoning to be found on page i88 of his 
book : 

"Common people, soldiers, artisans, those who are 
accustomed to passive obedience and those who have 
docile dispositions, have seemed to me the quickest to 
receive suggestions." 

They are the class who would most naturally yield 
to an emanative, positive, physical fluid or force, and 
less capable of receiving suggestions. His remark that 
no one can be hypnotized against his own will is 
gratuitous. We all know of personal thralldom and of 
intellectual and volitional paralysis under the domin- 
eering of another person. Bernheim and Donato could 
not see the fluidic force ; therefore, they argue there is 



l62 ELECTRICITY AND 

none. We might as well argue that because they can- 
not see into the minds of their subjects, their subjects 
were deceiving them. Bernheim says that with some 
he has to "repeat'' and "lay more stress" on what he 
says. How is this necessary when the intellectual sug- 
gestion is the same? Very likely with his repetitions 
he sends out vibrations. A command from a stranger 
by letter is less effective than a command from the 
stranger by oral presence. If a person, in the state of 
hypnosis, awake on command, then obviously the mind 
does not receive the suggestion, for, intellectually, 
there is no mind. More obviously a force has pene- 
trated to the seat of the mind and awakened it. He 
speaks of the "difficulty of hypnotizing refractory per- 
sons''; and all through his essay the law of force is 
illustrated in his repeated efforts to hypnotize the same 
subject and the subject finally yielding. If mere 
suggestion is the cause, why is not once suggesting 
sufficient, as there is at the first as full an intellectual 
apprehension of the suggestion as there is at the sixth 
repetition? We know very well that the same sug- 
gestion has a different effect coming from different 
persons ; so we can see that the influence is not all in 
the mere passing words. A weak or negative person 
can make precisely the same suggestion and under the 
same circumstances and yet not be obeyed as positive 
persons would. And passive persons have no better 
apprehension of the suggestion than positive persons, 
although they yield easier to force because they are 



THE RESURRECTION, 163 

weaker. Bernhelm requires passivity, that Is, non- 
resistance. What has that to do with receiving a sug- 
gestion? Passivity and positivity relate only to phys- 
ical force, not to intellectual grasp of a suggestion. 
He remarks, ''Without doubt impressionability varies." 
What does he mean by impressionability but less capac- 
ity to resist force? He cannot mean less capacity to 
receive intellectual impressions, for his suggestions are 
all very simple. Again he says, "I define hypnotism 
as the induction of a peculiar physical condition which 
increases the susceptibility to suggestion.'' There is 
a whole system of philosophy in the words ''induc- 
tion'' and "peculiar." He has claimed that suggestion 
in the mind of the subject produced the phenomena. 
But here he admits an objective antecedent, and that 
antecedent is a physical condition. That antecedent 
must be a fluid, inducted. Psychologists will be loath 
to believe that suggestion of the plain and simple phe- 
nomena cited by him is not as readily received by one 
subject as by another, although with results varying 
according to passivity, weakness or strength. Again 
he remarks, "It is true that certain subjects cannot 
resist because their will power is weakened by fear or 
by the idea of a superior will power which influences 
them in spite of themselves." Why use the word 
"power" ? No power is required to make or to receive 
a suggestion. The strongest child, woman or man can 
receive a suggestion as quickly as any other. If this 
hypnotism is from mere imagination and subjective 



l64 ELECTRICITY AND 

volition a person could hypnotize himself ; or the sug- 
gestion could come from any source as well as from a 
positive individual, and this would ignore all the well- 
known phenomena of personal dominition, of craven 
submission ; and in intellectual and social relations of 
free agency, and reduce all human kind to animals. 

Hypnotism is a social condition that has always been 
universal and always will be until that coming time of 
general and perfect individualism. It is something 
more than therapeutic treatment by a positive, bright, 
successful and confident medical official over a few 
sick, ignorant, poverty-stricken and passive hospital 
patients who are "accustomed to obedience" and to 
childish credulity, a class from which it seems Dr. 
Bernheim has obtained his subjects. Hypnotism, in its 
general and practical aspect, is the subjection of one 
mind and will to another; and this can be seen, and 
always has been seen, wherever two or more human 
beings have been together, with or without a sugges- 
tion. Perhaps its surgical application has been 
more practical of late years than ever before, but there 
is much more in this grand social philosophy than saw- 
ing oflf legs, pulling out teeth and cutting up stage 
tricks. It is difficult to see where Dr. Bernheim gets 
his authority for asserting that these results of his prac- 
tice do away with all mesmeric philosophy. He ap- 
pears to beg the question all the way through his book. 
But if there were really an emanating fluid accom- 



THE RESURRECTION. 165 

panying the suggestion or command, according to Dr. 
Charpignon, how could Dr. Bernheim discover that 
fluid ? It appears that Dr. Bernheim by his official and 
professional authority always enforced these hypnotic 
cures by more or less ^'will power" and "command." 
It would strike the average reasoner that, although the 
command made the suggestion sink deeper and made 
the subject submit more, his weak-minded patients 
were mesmerized as well as moralized. Looking over 
Dr. Bernheim's entire work we fail to see any proof 
in it that there is no fluidic emanation, although the 
Doctor was largely successful in hypnotic cures. The 
fluidic theory and the suggestive theory are compatible 
with each other in the sense that they work together as 
mind and matter always work. Admitting all that he 
claims as to his hypnotic suggestions he has not dis- 
proved the fluidic theory ; and it is difficult, from any- 
thing that he has published, to see why he attacked it. 
Undoubtedly Mesmer claimed too much ; and his phil- 
osophy spread to charlatans, as the practice under the 
suggestive theory has also spread. 

Professor Donato, who is a recent successful per- 
former in doubtful stage hypnotism, also takes dog- 
matic ground that the personal influences of one will 
over another are wholly by moral and intellectual sug- 
gestion, and not a bit by mesmerism or emanation of 
a substance, magnetic current, or motion from the 
dominating will. His publications with the photo- 
gravures embraces his whole theory and practice ; but 



l66 ELECTRICITY AND 

neither his argument, nor the physiognomies of his 
practiced corps of "assistants" succeeds in reaching 
the full credulity of all their readers. It will take bet- 
ter reasoning than is exhibited in either Donato's or 
Bernheim's works to prove that the source of impulse 
in the persons operated upon is wholly suggestive. 
Like Bernheim, Donato begs the question and does not 
show by a single fact that there is not a fluidic power. 
Because he finds action in his subjects concurrent with 
his suggestion he stops there and says that the impulse 
is fully subjective. How does he know that there does 
not emanate from his brain a vibration, for he has a 
Napoleonic will, and (he himself hath said it) he is 
"quick, ardent, impetuous to excess." And he also 
speaks of men who are gifted with "prodigious moral 
magnetism and exercise an irrestible ascendency over 
all persons who surround them." Now, the terms 
"force of will" and "magnetism" are but metaphors if 
the cause of the phenomena is only suggestive, or if 
suggestion needs his "force" and "impetuosity." The 
will can have no force or moral magnetism unless it be 
an objective and material force. We cannot reason- 
ably conceive of one will controlling another by "force" 
unless by actual impact of substance. If this be so it 
dissipates all claimed suggestive hypnotizing powers 
and the pretense of one man's superiority to another, 
unless the power is physical or unless it is exercised 
through some subtle material agency. Donato's own 
photogravure looks like Napoleon, and while some of 



THE RESURRECTION, 167 

his corps of assistants look, facially, like passive docile 
creatures, others have an air so far from the line of 
simplicity as to be suspected of bordering upon de- 
ception. The photos tell the true tale. The very fact 
that Professor Donato bases his success as a hypnotizer 
upon his ''ardent and impetuous" temperament and 
''force of will" would seem to sustain the emanative 
theory ; else the same suggestion by a negative, piping, 
whining person would be sufficient for mere intellec- 
tual perception by a subject and the consequent hyp- 
nosis. Referring again to Bernheim we ask, What has 
a strong will to do with the suggestion? Those terms 
belong to two different laws of mind. Suggestion be- 
longs to the reflective and perceptive faculties. Will 
power is classed with the emotional and it is made up 
of continuity, impulse, persistence, courage and 
strength. 

In all human experience, ever since society began, it 
has been instinctively believed by everybody that per- 
sonal ascendency and domination arises from some- 
thing more than a mere suggestion. In old 
times it was called withcraft, and reasonably 
so. Interest in the subject is not confined to 
Punch and Judy exhibitions, nor even to the 
useful lines of surgery, but it involves all there is 
of social law. In an article by Professor Donato he 
speaks of surgico-mesmeric operations being reported 
by eminent men as finally disproved. The Professor 
should not complain of the great world that does not 



1 68 ELECTRICITY AND 

know him, but is bent upon scientific proof, and pro- 
vides its grain of salt when reading some of his state- 
ments, supposing that there might be a mistake some- 
where, such as that of throwing upon the floor, by look 
and threat, the young lawyer of Belgium. We do not 
know but that it was a mechanical motion of the young 
lawyer from the dread of bodily assault of the Napole- 
onic eye or a disposition to accommodate the Professor 
in his performances. We might say that the thirty 
passive military students mentioned were playing 
pranks upon the Professor because we cannot see into 
their minds anv more than the Professor can see the 
fluidic emanation. It will be seen that in every in- 
stance of the phenomena which the Professor has pro- 
duced it has been by the bodily presence oi the operator, 
as in Bernheim's cases. While Profesor Donato is 
doubtless doing valuable service in the new discoveries, 
it will not do for him to dogmatically assert that there 
is no truth in mesmerism, for we have had for years 
and years the incidents of his stage performances, in 
detail and in group, that he has just now illustrated in 
print, performed in public and set before the world 
through different ''professors"; and there is an un- 
fortunate resemblance in all these stage exhibitions to 
the stereotyped manifestations of spiritualists, who 
have had, for a generation, the same fish horns, tam- 
bourines, guitars, rattling ropes, phosphorescent 
breathings and cabinet sleight of hand. So all of the 
public hypnotizers have their stereotyped ''chilly 



THE RESURRECTION. 169 

groups/' "overheated groups/' ''overweighted" indi- 
viduals, ''paralyzed'' individuals, "fishing parties" and 
grotesque antics, all of which have not yet reached the 
public confidence. Bernheim and Donato cannot upset 
Holy Writ, nor such thinkers as Zeno, Bacon, Schel- 
ling, Walter Scott, Gladstone, Emerson, Spinoza, 
Zschoke, and hosts of others. 

''When she had heard of Jesus, came in the press be- 
hind and touched His garment. And Jesus immediately 
knowing, in Himself, that virtue had gone out of Him, 
turned Him about in the press and said, 'Who touched 
my clothes?' " 

There is a broader hypnotism than that of surgery. 
God hypnotizes man, man hypnotizes the brute, males 
hypnotize females, the positive half of society hypno- 
tizes the passive half, the judge hypnotizes the lawyer, 
the lawyer the jury, the general the army, the master 
the servant. Sometimes all this action is reversed by 
an inborn personal power. 

Dr. Osgood Mason in the Arena for April, 1891, 
writes concerning a psychic medium in hypnotism. 

"There are facts, however, which tend to show the in- 
sufficiency of suggestion to cover the ground, and which 
point to some other definite influence as efficient in 
hypnotic processes. ... It (the psychic medium) 
is the medium by which hypnotic sleep is induced and 
hypnotic suggestions are realized through distances far 
too great to allow suggestion to reach even the most 



170 ELECTRICITY AND 

sensitive subject by any of the ordinary channels of 
sense perception. In its widest sense it is the medium 
of influence which manifests throughout the whole or- 
ganic life of the world; the medium through which 
qualities are perceived, opinions formed and loves es- 
tablished; independent of knowledge gained by ordinary 
sense perceptions or any process of reasoning. It is 
the medium of intuition. A grave doubt is springing 
up in the minds of careful and thorough observers re- 
garding the universal application of suggestion as 
claimed by the Nancy School. The coming school will 
modify materially the present teaching on the subject. 
It will take for its fundamental idea a psychic medium 
or a psychic force." 



It is a dangerous teaching that mere suggestion can 
throw a mind into an abnormal, passive action, for it 
strikes at the root of all free v^ill and individual and 
legal responsibility. Suggestion might come into the 
mind from unknov^n and irresponsible sources, or 
might originate involuntarily in one's own mind. 
There come thousands of unnatural suggestions and 
fancies to us, like irresponsible dreams, that the free 
will and judgment are constantly overcoming, and we 
are held responsible by divine and civil law for not act- 
ing upon them. But with the fluidic theory, which is 
objective and somewhat of physical and tangible force, 
the free agency is left morally intact. The fluid force 
may be resisted and its presence escaped from, but the 
suggestion may be revived anywhere. 

Whether this material overflow from one mind to an- 
other can ultimately overcome free agency is not a 



THE RESURRECTION, 



171 



matter of doubt, because it follows physical laws and 
diminishes its force by distance. It takes time and 
persistence to oppose it, and thus it may be evaded by 
absence and by a counteracting mental force. Its power 
is inversely as the square of the distance. Suggestions 
from governments and laws do not find obedience alone 
through the fears, interests or moral sense of the cit- 
izens. There is an unseen dynamic power that goes 
from the presence and persons of the administrators of 
the government and the laws. No prerogatives, priv- 
ileges or ''divinity" would save a king from being wor- 
ried to death unless he could exercise this solid etheric 
will with his commands to go along with the voluntary, 
passive subjection of his people. And without that 
mysterious original power kings have become pitiable 
tools and laughing stocks. All government would run 
to chaos but for this extraneous Huidic personal will- 
power in its administration. And the same principle 
applies in military commands. 

This personal magnetism in society, in the church, in 
business, in government, is the vitality, impulse and 
stay of law and order. It is as prevalent and potent 
now as the reservoirs of electricity that fill the uni- 
verse, and is always as ready for use in human govern- 
ment as in machinery. Every social phenomenon indi- 
cates its presence. 

Professor J. W. Hermann, the prestidigitateur, in a 
communication to the New York Herald, makes this 
statement : 



172 ELECTRICITY AND 

"I can liken the essence of hypnotism to nothing else 
than a subtle fluid vibrating in the mind of the mag- 
netizer, and which passes from him by means of his 
hands or otherwise into the subject, upon whom it pro- 
duces efifects either corresponding to those felt by the 
principal or desired by him." 



His article, three columns in length, evinces schol- 
arly research and native ability. 

A man visits a stranger to petition him for some- 
thing. The visitor's impressment is made before a 
word is spoken, and sometimes before the eyes meet. 
An influence goes before him that is not '"manner." 
A business man advertises for a clerk. Of the many 
who apply, one instantly makes the succesful impres- 
sion regardless of specious statements or letters of 
introduction. Business men seldom foot up qualities. 
They select instantly, by intuition. 

If mental magnetism be real force we must study 
its laws for our own safety. The days of personal 
sway are not passed; we are still slaves to it. Self- 
asserting, magnetic personalities are everywhere — in 
offices, houses, assemblies, workshops and states. In- 
dividualism has hardly assumed its dignity more than 
it did in the days of feudalism or patriarchism. To 
discover this unseen force, analyze it, learn how to cul- 
tivate it where it is weak and to control or resist it 
where it is Strong, to develop the dignity of the in- 
dividual and to destroy this all powerful dominion of 
individuals, of fashion, social epidemics, passional 



THE RESURRECTION. 173 

storms, fads and spiritual contagions, is a study the 
race should address itself to and one that practically 
pays its votaries. 

When an audience is moved by an orator, do the 
people themselves arouse what is independently within 
them, corresponding to the images and fire that are in 
the speaker, from his suggestions, words, gestures, ac- 
tions and example, or does there proceed from the ora- 
tor an outgoing substance that infects the minds of 
the audience like contagion, or as one magnet inducts 
power into another? The true orator is he whose 
heart beats forth a current of real electricity, stronger 
than that radiated by his audience, and he carries them 
on by the superior counter-flood of his own stream of 
soul-force. A man comes home at night from his 
work and reads in the paper that the country's flag has 
been fired upon. He has received this "suggestion." 
He becomes angry. In this case the editor has, in type, 
simply aroused the man, by suggestion, to similar con- 
ditions with those of the editor. Then the man goes out 
to public meetings and there the infection of the orator 
and the combined elements of popular magnetism about 
him whelm him on to the cannon's mouth. This is sim- 
ple, outward, objective, substantive, literal magnetism 
or electricity, not a moral force. A mother is told that 
her absent child is dying; she arouses within herself 
a subjective sympathy. When she reaches the pres- 
ence of her child there is then established a link be- 
tween them, as actual, real, objective and sustaining as 



174 ELECTRICITY AND 

the sinews that bind the inert planets in obedient or- 
bits about the sun, and as helpful as the fresh air that 
is let into the sick-room, or the medicine that is put 
into the blood. Sympathy transfuses a stream of 
ready-made life that is as sustaining as nutrition. A 
sympathetic wife furnishes intellectual and physical 
strength to her husband. 

The universal principle of social centralization ap- 
plies to psychic phenomena as well as to physical phe- 
nomena. As a small ball is attracted out of its vertical 
position by a large ball while both are hanging, so a 
weak mind is attracted and influenced by a strong one. 
It is a mistake to place the weak to sleep with the 
strong unless the strong is animated by sympathy and 
love, as is the case with the mother for the infant, with 
the good husband for the delicate wife. Many a wife 
digests food for her husband's strength and neither 
ever knows it. She transfers to him this ready-made 
vitality in a manner similar to the transfusion of 
blood. The laying on of hands is better than blood 
letting of nurse or friend. Sympathy is as material 
and flooding a force as fresh air and sunshine. 

"Just as the sun pervades all space with its light and 

heat, so man, small indeed of physical stature, carries a 

; diffusive and persuasive presence that fills the home and 

I street with an atmosphere that blights or with influences 

that bless/ —Dr. Dwight Hillis. 

^'People may live in an atmosphere of sympathy which 
will be a communicating medium." — Ian McLaren. 



THE RESURRECTION. 175 

Is he, too, using a metaphor, or is this ''atmosphere 
of sympathy'' a real and objective thing? 

The positive soul levies upon bodied and disembodied 
souls for contributions. The writer once sat by a 
distinguished judge under the thrilling presence of a 
political speaker, when the judge remarked, "Ah, if 
that man had been nominated for the presidency what 
a magnetism he would have sent through the land/' 
He was asked what he meant by magnetism, and 
whether his remark was figurative or implied. He 
could not tell. And Gibbon said of Peter the Hermit : 
"A nerve of exquisite feeling was touched which 
vibrated to the heart of Europe.'' Was Gibbon, too, 
using a simile? It was literal; the multitudes were 
led, whirled on to Palestine by an objective flood, or 
wind of mere public force. The "nerve" was psychical 
vibration and attraction, not moral influence. 

To those who answer that bodily expression and 
verbal images or logic create the influence by arous- 
ing subjective similarities, let the reply be that lan- 
guage bears no proportion to the power of the soul. 
The soul is infinite; language is local, incidental and 
temporary. Language is never adequate to express the 
soul. Then, as social beings, have we no power 
of communication but by word, by looks and gestures ? 
Mind was made before speech; the social bond was 
made before education. Animals without speech know 
each other's minds. 



176 ELECTRICITY AND 

Mathews in ^'Orators and Oratory/' makes these re- 
marks : 

"The orator has to remember that the communication 
of thought and feeling from mind to mind is not a 
process which depends upon a proper selection of words 
only. There is another and more spiritual conductor, 
a mysterious moral contagion by means of which, inde- 
pendently of the words of the speaker, thoughts and 
feelings are transmitted to his auditory. This quality, 
call it personal magnetism, call it a divine afflatus, call 
it, with Dr. Bushnell, a person's atmosphere, or what 
you will — it is the only all-potent element which, more 
than any other, distinguishes the true orator." 

And this power is inborn. It can be cultivated only 
by a pure life. Dr. Caldwell, speaking of military elo- 
quence, used this direct language: 

"The brain and muscles of the speaker must be indi- 
rectly connected with the brains of the auditors, else it 
would be impossible for them to produce an impres- 
sion; nor can they be thus connected except by a subtle, 
intervening ether of which our senses take no cogni- 
zance but which is in actual contact with the brain of 
each party; the atmosphere is too gross for an agency 
so penetrating and refined. This fluid is secreted by the 
brain from the arteries and is thrown off by the brain; 
and on no other theory can we form an intelligible con- 
ception of the peculiar effects of oratory." 

Then we may ask, if language is not a sure medium 
of communication, what medium have we? Has the 
comprehensive divine plan left us with imperfect means 



THE RESURRECTION. 



177 



of understanding each other? And we have sympa- 
thetic social harmony and concurrence besides conven- 
tionaHties. How do we maintain that harmony ? This 
universal psychic fluid must be the means or the 
medium of our mental assimilation. It cannot be too 
often repeated that the harmony of society, the com- 
munication of different minds, is like osmosis of gases 
and fluids. All living things are in an ocean of etheric 
communication. There is no other explanation of our 
concurrence which, otherwise, would be mere accident 
and coincidence.. 



"Mr. McLaughlin mused for a moment and then re- 
sumed: 'I sometimes think that fish have a sixth sense. 
IVe seen things during my fishing trips that have led me 
to believe this. This sense is one of the things that we 
can't understand, because, I suppose, it takes a similar 
sense to understand it. Do you follow me? Now how 
is it if I cut a fish to pieces and throw the pieces over- 
board, the fact seems to be known at once to every 
dog-fish within a mile or so? Anyhow it is so. It 
can't be sight that they use. It can hardly be smell. It 
can't be taste, and it is not possible that they have a 
language. Yet they come all the same. One of the 
puzzles of the sea.' " — Brooklyn Citizen. 

The explanation is that animals know these facts 
as the magnetic needles know where the poles are, 
from simple magnetic contact through this universal 
flood of etheric vibration, by the law of wireless tel- 
egraphy. 



178 ELECTRICITY AND 

What keeps the herds together and gives them their 
intelHgent direction? They have no speech and they 
are not guided by agreement or command. What en- 
ables a migrating flock of birds to go hither and thither, 
aHghting here and there with as good arrangement as 
any convention or army? They have no conventional 
sign ; they have no chosen leader. Now one part of 
the flock goes ahead and now another part ; but they 
are governed by one result toward one object, and 
their journey is performed successfully. The trite an- 
swer will come that it is ^'instinct." Well, what is 
instinct? Simultaneousness and mere coincidence of 
idea will not suffice to explain. A bird might "think'' 
forever, yet the other birds would not know it, unless 
they were actually connected. Instinct is contact — 
literally touch by an unseen medium. Much of in- 
stinct and intuition is simple telepathy. 

"The captain paused and meditatively sipped his 
toddy. 'Scientific men/ he resumed, Vho never saw 
more than one cow at a time in all their lives, know ex- 
actly what causes a drove to stampede; but cowboys, 
who have herded cattle all their lives, are still in the 
dark* It is well enough to say that something fright- 
ened one of the steers and he scared all the rest, only it 
don't work that way. If you have a drove of five hun- 
dred or ten thousand, the panic strikes every one of the 
cattle at the same moment.' " — Clipping. 

How could this be but by mental electricity? The 
whole human race is in a passive, herding condition. 



THE RESURRECTION. 179 

worked upon by a general medium. Lucky the man 
that knows this and is thus forewarned. All are crea- 
tures of impulses that come from without, as well as 
within, seldom acting from individual free will. So- 
ciety and states are governed by impulse, parties are 
run by it. Public judgment seldom decides anything. 
Human beings congregate mechanically to an attractive 
psychic center as matter tends to sphericity, yielding 
their free agency passively to the individual of the 
most strength and activity and cunning. We can 
avoid this tendency to passive influence by being made 
aware of and educated about the objective stream of 
unseen force that is besetting us. This universal hyp- 
notic influence fills all space like the rays of the sun. 
We can guard against its mechanical influence by 
knowledge of it. The present barbarous selfishness and 
egoism of our race form a social pressure everywhere 
existing, that finds an outlet at the weakest point. 
Negative people are involuntarily and insensibly 
crowded to the wall, even in their own families and 
workshops. Consciousness of nervous strength gives 
aggressiveness; consciousness of nervous weakness 
gives compliance. Society, like a herd of causelessly 
stampeded cattle, will take a sudden whim for or 
against a person. Sometimes this is professional, 
sometimes political. Mad and grotesque pranks are 
played by the ''dear people'' in their respect and their 
disrespect. Men find themselves surprised by their 
immediate fame and fortune, and others at as sudden, 



l8o ELECTRICITY AND 

unaccountable and unjust unpopularity. The wise and 
brave can detect, scorn and control this tide. 

MESMERIC AUTHORITIES. 

Esdaile says : "Mesmerism is a natural power of the 
human body." Paracelsus holds that in the human 
frame exists something of the sidereal nature, some- 
thing derived from the stars, that the soul is united to 
the body by an animal fluid. Teste makes this remark : 
"Here, then, we see beyond all dispute the will of one 
individual transmitting itself in silence to another 
individual who is not aware of his presence." He asks, 
"What is the vehicle of this will ?" and answers, "The 
magnetic fluid." Mesmer himself said, "There exists 
a mutual influence between the heavenly bodies and 
the earth, and between the earth and its living bodies, 
a fluid universally diffused and admitting no vacuum, 
whose subtility is beyond all comprehension." Ash- 
burner said, "Od is a cosmical force radiating from 
star to star, permeating the universe, and an element 
differing from both magnetism and electricity." (Can 
this be the soul stuff?) Newman speaks of the fluid 
used in fascination as a "nervous vapor." And Gre- 
gory, "If odic fluid exists, it traverses space just as 
light does, and distance is of no importance; it is 
probably the medium of the transmission of sympathy." 
Sergeant Cox declares, "Psychic force consists of a 
material essence that executes the command of the will 



THE RESURRECTION, i8i 

over matter." Denton has put down, ''Radiant forces 
pass from us continually, as truly as light proceeds 
from the stars. A speaker reaches his audience by in- 
visible waves that penetrate to the interior sense." 
Evans writes : ''The mind is a spiritual substance ; there 
goes from it a sphere that surrounds it, and it is a 
radiant force like light or heat." And now we come 
to a man who declares that this force can be seen. 
Dr. Ashburner, in his translation of Dr. Reichenbach's 
work on odic forces, says he has made a great many 
experiments with highly sensitive persons, and he con- 
tinues : 



"There is an imponderable, material substance ema- 
nating from the mind, directed by the will, that is so 
effective as a material power that it may be polarized 
and imparted from one thing to another. After a long 
course of experimenting upon sensitive individuals, I 
have come to the conclusion that a force which is a 
material agent, attended by or consisting of a colored 
light, emanates from the brain of a man when he 
thinks, that his will can direct its impingement, and 
that it is a motive power. I have known at least fifty 
people who have seen a grey, silver or blue light ema- 
nating from my hands, and that a great many persons 
have been put into mesmeric sleep by me, having seen 
a blue light issuing in copious streams from my eyes 
when concentrating thought in the act of volition or 
study." 

This, if true, has not yet been imparted to be gen- 
eral knowledge or belief of mankind; but there have 



i82 ELECTRICITY AND 

been discovered too many facts of a like wonderful 
nature to gainsay it without reason. 

'Then from those cavernous eyes 
Pale flashes seemed to rise, 
As when the Northern skies 
Gleamed in December." 

— Longfellow's Skeleton in Armour. 

Here is an intuitive implication that psychic power 
and electricity are the same. 

We cannot suppose that the mind's only means of 
enlightenment is through the ordinary physical senses, 
nor that our social harmony depends upon the con- 
ventional signs we have adopted. The soul is too great 
for that. Mind is above language; consciousness is 
superior to physical expression. Is there not more in 
the bond of Christian fellowship than there is in the 
written doctrine? There is a ''sacred fire.'' Is there 
not more in soldierly gallantry than in military law, or 
personal will? There is the influence in the charging 
line that lifts the timid into momentary heroism. Could 
Demosthenes' ''suggestions" have aroused the Athen- 
ians if Demosthenes had given them out as an editor? 
Do the recited speeches of Clay or Henry by the most 
approved elocutionists stir an audience as those orators 
did? Without some law of contact how can there be 
synchronous concurrence among masses of people? 
Does the perfect accord of a hundred musicians de- 
pend upon the exactitude of independent action in each 



THE RESURRECTION, 183 

of them, or does one mind actually imbue the whole 
mass and all harmonize with each other for the time 
being by some kind of contact like different electric 
machines run by one battery ? Strike a chord on a harp 
in a room where there are a thousand harps, a similar 
chord will be produced from all. Do we not thus 
radiate through some objective medium upon each 
other our different moods of humor, and without look, 
speech or contact? This psycho-mechanics is directly 
applicable to moral conduct. Keep away from the 
evil; keep near to good. 

As our bodies are susceptible to direct physical infec- 
tion without our knowing the sources, so our minds 
are influenced by infection ; and why one man has that 
religion or politics, having received it while his brain 
was negative, or is in this or that mood of ambition 
or despondency, purity or sensualism, anger or kind- 
ness, is much the same as why one has the yellow fever 
and another escapes, or why one has this disease and 
another has that. 

Every separate community has a center of moral 
force; it may break out mechanically in expression 
through one individual or another without definable 
cause, as crystals form here or there, or as rifts of sand 
are made in this place or that by floods. We can see 
how impulse and sensation, not logic, are the great 
moving causes of human conduct, and we get those 
impulses by the slightest outward spiritual vibrations. 
We see the people rushing blindly as brutes to shows 



l84 ELECTRICITY AND 

and excursions, or at the beck and wand of political 
and ecclesiastical magicians. Few men and women 
stand aloof with calm feelings, self-poise, clear views, 
and originality of will. The automatic rush of popular 
favor or displeasure alternate while the subject thereof 
remains unchanged. Speakers, editors, politicians, 
statesmen and priests know this law and strike while 
the iron is hot. 

While a knowledge of the separate existence and 
the free agency of the soul will put us on our guard 
against base dishonor of our own bodies and the im- 
positions and influences of society, it will also lead us 
to take the benefits of social psychic sympathy with its 
sustaining influences; for the sun is not truer to the 
tender plant or seed buried in the cold earth than is 
this lifting force of society to the soul of man where 
he adapts himself to its best. It is next to the spirit of 
the Almighty. We are mechanically drawn to each 
other as the vine twines or as the birdlet opens its 
beak for its first food. A medium of induction sur- 
rounds us to lead off our power or to lead power into 
us from others, as we choose. We must know this 
law to hold our own. We can see that, as regards this 
ethereal element which has so much to do with life, 
if indeed it be not life itself, there has been but little 
progress in human knowledge. We know that the 
action of the body evolves a personal electricity that 
we ought to conserve; we are helpless or passive as 
/' we lose its force, just as we are when we lose our 



THE RESURRECTION, 185 

animal heat or are exhausted by the labors of the day, 
and are in no condition to encounter other people. 
Just before a rainstorm, when the clouds draw the 
electricity from the atmosphere and earth many peo- 
ple feel depressed, feeble in circulation and weak in 
the heart's action. After the storm, when the elec- 
tricity is discharged back into the atmosphere in 
equilibrium, they are strong again. So animal elec- 
tricity will leave negative people and accumulate in 
the crowd or the audience, leaving the negative person 
weak and sleepy ; or it leaves a negative person to help 
a strong person. We can cultivate positiveness, throw 
out a personal influence of our own, and an effective- 
ness of character, which, if carried down and ac- 
cumulated through a succession of families, could pro- 
duce a personal influence so great, so far beyond our 
present degree, as to explain magic power. In Apple- 
ton's encyclopedia are these words : 

''The highest professors of magic have always 
claimed that it is fit only for kings or priests; it re- 
quires superior intelligence, the severest study, and an 
audacity which no peril can daunt, a will which no re- 
sistance can bend, and a discretion, devotion and an 
habitual silence, undisturbed by the temptations of the 
world. The man who has demonstrated his fearless- 
ness amid a conflagration, tempest, shipwreck and dark- 
ness, can terrify gnomes and sylphs and can invoke 
them." 



l86 ELECTRICITY AND 



CHAPTER VIII. 

THE THEOLOGY OF ETHERISM. 

"Earth to Earth" — Spiritual and etheric purity — Spontan- 
eous generation — Sex in chemistry — Omnipresence. 

This universal etheric soul-fluid — the body of God — 
is fashioned spontaneously into living organisms of a 
simple type, just as amoeba are, or as crystals are 
formed out of solutions. We do not know that physi- 
cal molecules are not conscious, although we know 
that they manifest no consciousness and no organic 
functions. So have our friends, who have been pro- 
nounced dead by science, been buried alive. All we 
know is that mere physical matter is not organized for 
the purpose of manifestation; but the formation of 
physical matter and of vegetable life is every bit as 
mysterious as animal life. The only mystery is God's -^ 
origin. His differentiation into organisms is not dif- 
ficult to understand. Assuming the existence of the 
all-pervading living ether, commingled with physical 
matter, which is only the ether condenced and crys- ^^^^ 
tallized, we naturally imagine that there is little or no 
difference between the living character of the atom 
and the smallest of the living organisms. It seems 
quite analogous that from this ether, and its atoms, 



THE RESURRECTION. 187 

organized life of the micrococci are, by myriads, struck 
into being and perhaps struck out of being at every 
instant. This would be the spontaneous generation 
that happened at one time; why could it not happen 
now? What would be the difference in the principle 
and order of the creation between then and now? 
This planet was once a ball of fire, so the scientists 
say, upon which no living organism could exist. But 
the ether existed with it, in it and around it. All living 
things that exist upon it now have been created since 
then, and in the first instance, without previous parent- 
age of like species. Who can prove that this period of 
creation is passed? Why is not the ''beginning" meant 
as the beginning of each species? There is more life 
beyond the microscope than there is on this side of it. 
This belief in spontaneous generation comes up nat- 
urally with the belief in the all-pervasiveness of the 
soul-ether, the alliance of which with physical matter 
is the breathing of the breath of life into it in the 
simpler and smaller living beings, like the infusoria, 
the amoebae and the bacilli. An amoeba, being formed 
by the admixture of soul life with the dust of the earth, 
its double or twin formation is the taking of the rib 
from Adam, and probably the two halves will be found 
to be positive and negative — male and female. Give 
them time, millions of years; that they make a man 
from evolution is comiprehensible. The Tyndalites 
sterilizing bottles, corks, air and hay tea and then find- 
ing no life do not cover the case. Creation needs a 



l88 ELECTRICITY AND 

freer and greater scope than a bottle and the limita- 
tions of a man's laboratory. It needs air, sunshine 
and electricity, all at work. The biogenists will remove 
some of their haze in this investigation when they 
cease to use the word "germ." An organized, living 
being if formed without a seed, but by a germ, would 
prove abiogenesis. A germ may be an atom or even 
an idea of God working upon a vortex of unatomized 
ether; it would be life, but no pre-existing kind. If 
so, then truly, as such germs cannot be destroyed, there 
would be no life without preceding life or ethereal 
life. Seed does not need to precede the first forms of 
life. A seed is a developed result of organism after 
the first start, a function of organism given like the 
other functions. 

<^* * * whose seed is within itself." — Genesis 
i: 2. 

Every clap of thunder strikes into being and out of 
being these ephemera. Every summer's heat breeds 
them anew for every winter's frost to kill them. The 
same active, creative process, without seed, can go on 
now in the swamps and prurient carcases as there ever 
did. We have not seen it all, as enlightened as we 
are. 

Seed was made after the creation of the species, not 
before. Biogenesis is the successor of abiogenesis. 
In the present order of planetary life seed is the usual 
course of perpetuating the species ; but the ever-living 



THE RESURRECTION, 189 

principle of ethereal life, acting upon physical matter, 
now, as at the beginning, is not destroyed. 

The semblant vegetation on the window pane and 
the flagstone that can be formed in a fraction of a 
second, is not without its lesson to us of the immediate 
presence of the creative power and His continuing 
process of creation all about us. Those crystal palms 
and ferns do not bear seed, nor do they reproduce their 
species, but their shapes show the hand that is making, 
at the same instant, in other places, the floral beings 
that do bear seed. We see a jar of solution as clear as 
water of the purest kind. Suddenly we see a little 
point of solidification, from which we see a crystal 
move quickly, then another and another until the 
process looks like a display of pyrotechnics; and al- 
most immediately the whole is a solid mass, to remain 
so forever, with its "pre-existing forms." There was 
no seed; the characteristic shapes of the species are 
spontaneously generated by the unseen but real hand 
that formed the species in the first instance that do 
bear seed. 

As to bacteria, it is more natural to suppose that 
they are spontaneously generated from this soul-ether, 
or by some magnetic causes, than that germ seeds had 
lain dormant "requiring only peculiar climate influ- 
ences to revive them" — a convenient and slip-shod 
phrase used to supply a lack of information. Even 
the grippe is called by scientists a bacterial disease, as 
though it was started at the Moses period ; because, of 



IQO ELECTRICITY AND 

course, under the biogenesis theory, the bacteria must 
have had their parents and have been ''lying dormant." 
Centuries ago the grippe was attributed to the influ- 
ence of the planets. Dr. Carl Siler claims it to be a 
disease of the nervous system, and that it appeared 
simultaneously in Maine, Texas, Florida and Wash- 
ington, without currents of wind, and that careful in- 
vestigation has failed to show any specific germ or 
micro-organism as the cause. (The germs, or 
microbes, were probably caused by climatic condi- 
tions.) Dr. E. R. Dufify publishes an article claiming 
the origin of the cholera germ in magnetic or electric 
disturbances. Those diseases have seeds, but as re- 
sults of the diseases, not as causes of them. 

''I do not know this. I was in Paris during the chol- 
era plague, when hundreds of people were dying about 
me each day. The only precaution which I used was to 
wear silk underclothes and double-soled silk stockings, 
thus making myself a nonconductor and keeping my 
natural electricity imprisoned." — Clipping. 

This practice by scientists is now successfully in 
vogue in this country of rapid climatic changes. Silk 
underwear in the winter keeps the temperature uniform 
and the mind cheerful because silk is a non-conductor 
and prevents the moisture of the air and of the streets 
from conducting away heat and electricity and also 
preventing magnetic human influences. 



THE RESURRECTION. 191 

SEX IN CHEMISTRY. 

Can the microscope prove that bacteria and amoebae 
can reproduce their species except by fission ? Positive 
and negative atoms, by their sexual energy and affinity 
are all the time springing organisms into existence. 
Neither science, history nor philosophy can locate a 
beginning. We cannot tell how long it takes to make 
a beginning, whether it is an instant or a billion years. 
Atomic sexuality is the ebb. and flow and energy of the 
universe, the life and soul of all things, organic as 
well as inorganic, in minerals, plants and animals. It 
is the active, sentient will of God, like gravitation or 
the tides. Without this sexual affinity in all creation 
everything would vanish back again into the ether 
whence it came. 

It is worth enquiring into whether this modern de- 
velopment of mechanical electricity has not created 
new diseases and revived old ones, as it has disturbed 
the orderly and periodic weather conditions. Time was 
when we could predict the weather, almost hour by 
hour. The seasons were so characteristic that we 
allegorized them by human forms and by poetry. Now 
the weather is all mixed up. If the ether is static, and 
a cosmic reality, the disturbance of it from its normal 
position by millions of tons of dynamo force, might 
readily produce static changes ; and with these climatic 
changes diseases, physical and mental, would result, 
The world is no happier from this development of me- 



192 ELECTRICITY AND 

chanical electricity, but on the contrary is much more 
unhappy, and will some day rebel against it. 



it i- 



'But I am sure/ continued the Professor, 'that 
tuberculosis has a microbe origin. For my part, I con- 
sider that phthisis is of a human origin. In other 
words, that we produce in ourselves not only the tuber- 
cle, but the bacillus of Koch. It comes from within 
and not from without/ " — Professor Michel Peter. 

This is spontaneous generation. The Bastian school 
— the abiogenesists believed, from their careful ex- 
periments, in spontaneous generation. The Tyndal 
school, the biogenesists, from the very same experi- 
ments more perfected, believed in life organization only 
from pre-existing life organization. Without expect- 
ing the latter to overcome their Ptolemyism by asking 
them to time or locate the "beginning," we may call 
attention to the fact that the Tyndalists, by sterilizing 
all the elements by fire, did not give the seedless ele- 
ments a natural process and favor. The more satis- 
factory experiment would be to first deseed (not 
sterilize) and leave the air, water, earth, electric in- 
fluences, and simple elements fresh, natural and free. 
Germs are beyond our reach. Germs and seed may be 
diflferent. The sun's rays, air, water and earth, need 
a chance in fair combination with each other, effected 
by electric and spirit influences, to produce organisms 
spontaneously. Until some manipulative means to do 
that and to efTect a complete removal of all seeds is 
discovered, the experiments will not be entirely con- 



THE RESURRECTION. 



193 



elusive. Germs are living things, but are not seeds. 
The same laws and conditions of nature always exist- 
ing, make always the same effects. If God reigns now 
and the laws of the universe are not changed, He is 
creating now, out of non-organization, here or on 
some other planet. The only difference between 
biogenesists and abiogenesists is that the former refer 
to the ''beginning" as away back, and the latter say 
that the beginning is going on now and all the time. 
An objection raised is that "we are not now discover- 
ing any new species." Give us more microscopy. 
Biogenesis may suit clumsy powers and be an excuse 
for narrowness, but it does not tally with our analytical 
and intuitive instinct that makes so many discoveries 
and puts life into physics. 

^'Science, too, has its imagination." — Professor Mc- 
Kay. 

THE RESURRECTION. 

Mind is self-preservative in its nature and can con- 
tinue itself if it have an imperishable substance to 
ride upon. People are beginning to ask, ''Must we 
always sow what others reap?" Is there a place of 
constancy and permanence that we desire above all 
things ? This bundle of experience and memories that 
we call "self," "mind," "ego," — has it a continuance 
after the dissolution of the physiology? If so what 
is its body? Is this mental illumination of itself? 
Does it die with the body? Is it arbitrarily con- 



194 ELECTRICITY AND 

tinued? Or is it of something else that endures by 
law Hke the eternal persistence of matter? Is this 
animal body only a type of another body that carries 
a mind along with it by similar methods hereafter ? If 
it is, that other thing should have a name and we 
should get hold of it. A spiritual or an electric body 
existing, having the material cohesiveness of all bodies, 
reinforced by a volitional tenacity, as in this life, 
where is the limit of its continuity? Given an im- 
perishable physiology, we have immortality simply 
from a desire to live. Our future life is analogous to j 
this life in its ambitions, desires, self-preservation and \ 
accretion of substance. Given an electrical body we | 
shall live on. 

"Our theory supposes that mind is matter and some- 
thing more. That every mind is an indestructible ma- 
terial unit, constituted by alHed force or consciousness, 
jointly conditioned with allied force and extension. 
The whole is an invisible, an immortal and a conscious 
personality." — Antoinette Brown Blackwell. 

This remark is a grand inspiration by one of the 
grandest women of America. When the dynamo 
ceases to move the light and force are extinguished; 
but we cannot say that the electricity (the ether) has 
been destroyed; it still remains in the reservoirs of 
nature. So, when the physiology ceases, soul expres- 
sion through its identical physiology ceases, but the soul 
itself remains in its own proper and ethereal realms. 
Whatever was made upon the planet will perish with 



THE RESURRECTION. 195 

the planet. After Its molten mass cooled in the be- 
ginning, the world was visited from the firmament by 
something called LIFE, which supplied itself with an 
earthly substance and called it ''organic form/' The 
''dust'' of these living things goes back again into the 
earth and the Life (ether) goes back into the firma- 
ment whence it came. Of that Life our individual 
souls are segregated; their earthly forms, when they 
have served their purpose, falling away and the liv- 
ing souls rising into liberty. 

"But thou shall flourish in immortal youth, 
Unhurt amid the war of elements, 
The wreck of matter and the crash of worlds." 

[The Soul]— Addison. 

"There is a God within us and we have intercourse 
with heaven. The spirit comes from abodes on high." 
—Ovid. 

"The soul, once begotten and made an individual, is 
immortal until its own perverse will extinguishes it."— 
The Perfect Way, 

"The soul of man cannot but be immortal by its very 
essence, being made after the image of God, and is, by 
essence, a simple spiritual substance, self-subsisting, in- 
dependent, in its intellectual action, of the body, and 
having no part of matter in it; not composite but sim- 
ple. What is so by essence is indestructible and im- 
mortal, for it contains within itself nothing which can 
cause death." — Rev. J. J. Williams. 

Too much stress cannot be laid upon these two pro- 
positions nor can they be too often repeated. Once 



196 ELECTRICITY AND 

having detached from our philosophy the materiaHstic 
absurdity that the mind or soul is the offspring of the 
body, we are prepared to take the step that the soul 
continues its corporeal existence by self-defense and 
desire, as the body-life does, and that its inherent 
momentum carries it across sleep, coma and physical 
death. This reflex power, both physical and mental — 
that is, action of the mind and body without apparent 
will power — is common, though still a mystery. The 
bodies of men and animals run and perform other ap- 
parently intelligent motions after decapitation. Insects 
do so for days and weeks. Fish swim after having 
been prepared for cooking. We awaken ourselves at 
any set moment out of a sound sleep and we at will 
call up forgotten facts. Memory, alone, is a proof of 
immortality. Every fact of our physical life points 
to a re-awakening after the dissolution of the body, 
if we can establish the existence of an electrical or 
ethereal body. 

ANIMALISM. 

It IS argued that our animal appetites have no place 
in the spirit land; that there will not be the mental 
sensation of hunger and the pleasure of appeasing hun- 
ger ; that there will be no venereal or corporeal appe- 
tites, nor the mental concept and pleasure of their 
satiety; no sensations of warmth or chill; no sensa- 
tions of fatigue or rest. Granted. 'They neither 
marry nor are given in marriage." Those mental con- 
ditions are in this world mere temporary perceptivities 



THE RESURRECTION. 



197 



of the soul. 'Tlesh and blood cannot inherit the king- 
dom of heaven/' neither can their appetites, which 
are conditions excited by bodily laws. The soul, dis- 
embodied, would have the capacity for bodily, excita- 
tions should bodily conditions be presented to it there. 
Soul is general and universal consciousness, and in 
the spiritual realm it would be perceptible to all ex- 
ternal objects of perception there as here. It would 
be liable to the conditions of anger, revenge, indigna- 
tion, cupidity, etc., if the corresponding external and 
bodily causes are presented to it. It will have the 
same constitution there as here ; but the worst, if not 
all of its temptations and disturbances, will be re- 
moved from it there in the removal of the gross body. 
But because "there is a law in my members warring 
against the law of my mind," it does not follow that 
the "members" have an animal soul or will of their 
own, or will follow the soul into eternity. 

In the spirit realm, the animal body being absent, 
the spirit will there have no bodily reflexions; it will 
have only ethereal relations, objects and conditions to 
perceive and to be excited by. There may be ether- 
eally corporeal appetites there of infinitely more 
refined condition than now, and the soul will be 
happily occupied with an infinitude of ethereal diversi- 
ties. In ethereal life there will be no temptation to sin. 
The death of the body and its conditions that stimulate 
appetites here does not lop off or reduce the quantity 
or perceptive range of the soul. Animal appetites are 



ig8 ELECTRICITY AND 

not in and of the soul, as original faculties, but are 
temporary excitations of the soul. Consciousness is 
the only faculty of the soul, and it is a universal faculty 
that can take cognizance of objectives infinitely. Love, 
happiness, social feeling, joy and all conditions in 
heaven, are excited there by outward spiritual rela- 
tions. If there were no angels, spirits, society, ethereal 
objects, no God, possibly there might be a conscious- 
ness of self only, but it would not be an existence or 
ego worth having. We can only fall back upon the 
analogy of this life and say. Outward diversities here 
make existence a blessing; why should they not exist 
there? It is just as easy there as here. Even in this 
world we can realize, temporarily at least, that there 
can be pure conditions of mind totally disconnected 
from bodily influences. Those abstract spiritual con- 
ditions may be prolonged infinitely here with normal 
and healthy minds and bodies. That is what is called 
''Holiness." There is no place in such a mind for 
carnality. What moral exaltation would there be in a 
world where there is no flesh at all? 



THE RESURRECTION, 199 



CHAPTER IX. 

SPIRITUALITY. 

Etheric susceptibilities — Spirit forms — The new heavens and 
the new earth — Seen through the gates — Instinct and intu- 
ition — Deduction and induction — The copula of the resurrec- 
tion is the persistence of matter and the persistence of mind 
allied — Hope the cement of the soul — Innate immortality — 
Individuality. 

The real existence of departed spirits and their in- 
fluence upon us here is not one whit more miraculous 
or unscientific than our hearing the beloved tones of 
voice of friends by the long distance telephone; and 
everything indicates that the two phenomena, electrical 
and spiritual, are in the same line of natural law. 

'The abstract possibility of apparitions must be ad- 
mitted by everyone who believes in a Deity and his 
superintending omnipotence. No man can read the 
Bible or call himself a Christian, without believing that 
the Deity, to confirm the faith of the Jews, and to over- 
come and confound the pride of the heathen, wrought in 
the land among miracles, using either good spirits or 
fallen angels." — Walter Scott. 

We have recited enough facts and drawn enough 
scientific analogies to show that a present belief in our 



200 ELECTRICITY AND 

individual life beyond the grave is on a par with our 
unknown belief only a few years ago in the now fully 
accomplished facts of the telephone and wireless teleg- 
raphy. The latent laws of electricity after thousands 
of ages of mankind burst suddenly into exposure upon 
this age as those of spiritualism will do, and one stands 
as much a marvellous revelation to our clouded intel- 
lects as the other. Within our time had a mechanical 
intuitionist said: *'You shall see the time when you 
can sit at your table and converse with any one within 
a thousand miles, or all over your city, ordering an 
opera ticket or a grocer's supply or hear the charming 
tones of an absent friend or put away upon a shelf a 
living oration for future ages,'' the reply would have 
been: ''Oh, crank, give us facts." Not only do we 
now sit by our fireside and have electricity convey 
out through storm, under the rivers, through the for- 
ests the tones of our dear ones, but through the 'phone 
we shall see them face to face. Is life beyond any 
more miraculous or unscientific ? 

There are living animals in the dark, cold bottom 
of the sea, with instincts as intelligent as ours as to 
food-getting, self -protection and social enjoyment. 
Because of these instincts, amounting, possibly, to 
flashes of apprehension, they may at times discover 
gradations of life above them toward the glimmering 
day, and even fancy to themselves the wonderful crea- 
tures of the earth's surface. Such a glimpse would 
be analogous to our own aspirations upward to the 



THE RESURRECTION. 201 

ethereal realm, just as rational and scientific, all being 
parts of one stupendous whole. 

But commercial spiritualism, or ''modern spiritual- 
iem/' so-called, has, as yet, been of no practical use to 
society. There may be prevailing psychic forces 
operating upon us and we may not, as yet, have the 
delicacy of apprehension sufficient to recognize them. 
Of our absent beloved in the world we suppose that 
we know really nothing except by the intermediary of 
post or messenger ; and yet all the while we may have 
some relation to them without knowing how to dis- 
cover or understand it. It is entirely within scientific 
analogy to say that there is some bodily radiating in- 
fluence between us on earth, hut we do not feel it. The 
hand feels no influence in the space between two mag- 
nets that attract each other, and yet we know that 
there is some physical influence passing in that space. 
So in respect to psychic influence ; its cognition by us 
may be the result of our sensitiveness and development. 
The diflference between the animal and the spiritual, 
although they are related by law, is so great and ex- 
treme that the latter has been called supernatural. 

That the spiritual substance is seen is sustained in 
the Bible by the use of the terms "angels" and 
"spirits." Whether with the eyes or not, it does not 
matter if the mind sees, really and objectively. We 
cannot see the expansive vapor in a glass engine that 
is pushing and working until it escapes into the air and 
is condensed into steam. The force in the brain and 



202 ELECTRICITY AND 

along the nerves of the draft horse might be discov- 
ered by sudden condensation, as in exposing it to the 
air; for no man can yet prove that the nerve fluid is 
not the very soul, per se, whereof the will proceeds. 

Chemists can solidify that almost ethereal gas, hy- 
drogen, and all the other elements, and when solidified 
they are jeen and are apparent to the senses, and when 
dropped on the floor make a sound like ringing steel. 
Is not the electric spark on the X-ray in vacuum a 
concentration of ether? And is not the "white light," 
so often mentioned in the Bible, the concentration of 
-the spirit essence ? There is no difference between the 
force that propels the trolley car and the force that 
courses along the nerves of an animal. Both are of the 
same substance. Our physical senses are made to 
recognize the physical elements, which, as they refine 

away, escape physical recognition, but they remain sub- 
stances. 

"Millions of spiritual creatures walk the earth unseen, j- 
both when we wake and when we sleep." — Milton. 

"I see no scientific reason for doubting that disem- 
bodied spirits affect men both for good and for evil as 
men affect one another." — Dr. Lyman S. Abbott. 

How can there be an ''affect" without contact? And 
we cannot conceive of anything having contact except 
substance. 

It may be that the extreme difference between spirit 
matter and physical matter prevents their mutual con- 



THE RESURRECTION. 203 

tact and influence except through bodily organization, 
thus making the so-called materializations utterly un- 
natural and unscientific and yet there might be, to a 
very fine and peculiar sensibility, a spirit-form ap- 
parent v/hether recognized optically or spiritually. 
There is a wide difference in the acuteness of our 
physical senses, and we cannot tell where the dividing 
line is between them and our intuitions. Some have 
said that all perceptions, all senses, are resolvable into 
one sense — that of touch ; the touch of molecular waves 
from distant physical objects upon the eye, the waves 
through the nerves touching upon the sensorium in 
the brain, and through that the touch of the soul and 
the consciousness. So may not the soul in the sen- 
sorium touch or be touched by objective things di- 
rectly, through molecular waves, in the air or ether and 
through the skull, without the intermediation of the 
eye or any of the common organs of the senses ? Are 
the ordinary senses our only means of perception and 
contact with the outer world ? This psychic substance, 
both bodied and disembodied, now unknown, may yet 
be felt and seen as an objective thing when we shall 
have the proper conditions, sensations and develop- 
ment. The spectroscope is the most delicate instru- 
ment devised for the detection of matter. If there is 
a magnetic stream, may there not be a mind stream, 
and can some new spectroscope detect that stream? 
Our perceptions are not alike; there are clairvoyants 
and mind readers, although coarse in organism, whom 



204 ELECTRICITY AND 

the world has been compelled to recognize, as there 
are plantation negro mathameticians and musicians of 
almost supernatural development. We do not see or 
recognize in any way the powerful element of elec- 
tricity that surrounds us until it concentrates into the 
lightning's flash. We do not all see the magnetic cur- 
rent, but some people say they do. Magnetic instru- 
ments can be made so delicate as to register the ap- 
proach of a man's hand at the distance of several 
inches. May not some human natures be so organized 
as to register this unseen force with certainty and prac- 
ticality? May not that cognition produce its subjec- 
tive impression and image upon the mind? However 
direct, active and real might be a spirit's contact with 
us, it might not be able to make any impression upon 
our dense and encrusted materialism. Many physical 
facts do not attract our notice because of the dullness 
and inexperience of our physical senses and of our 
mental receptivity. Perhaps after a further develop- 
ment we may see souls as objectively and really as we 
now photograph the unseen stars. We are told by 
scientists that at a time the world was enveloped all 
round with a dark mist, and that only a shadowy light 
reached the surface. At that time, reasoning by 
analogy, men could have known of the eternal stars 
and the blue heavens only a little way above. From 
their actual knowledge of the cooling of the earth they 
could have reasoned that away back it had been a ball 
of fire, shining by its own light ; that it had been con- 



THE RESURRECTION. 205 

densed from the cosmic gases and that therefore there 
must be other spheres hke it. They could have be- 
lieved all these things as deductions of science without 
visually penetrating the thick sheathing of vapor all 
about them. So it is in spiritual philosophy. When 
the opaque vapor of our carnal natures shall be cleared 
away we shall see the splendors of an angelic heaven 
as we now see the sidereal magnificence. It is no argu- 
ment worthy an intelligent being that what we cannot 
see is not. Only ten years before this writing Eliza 
Lamb Martyn said, *'We shall yet send messages with- 
out wood or wire." She was then indulged as a 
romancer. Now we have the common fact. The long 
distance telephone and the automobiles are near the 
heavenly conditions where we shall have the * Vings of 
angels." While waiting for the promised meteors there 
was seen behind the clouds a faint passing tint, scarcely 
perceptible. We knew there was a full-orbed shining 
messenger. There have been enough psychic phe- 
nomena to say that behind our mental clouds there 
is much to be revealed, and that when this curtain 
shall be drawn aside we shall no more be earth worms, 
but will be face to face with a glorious immortality 
where suffering shall be relieved, where wrongs shall 
be righted, where justice shall be done. 

This subtile, all-pervasive, etheric contact, upon 
which all senses and apprehensions travel, will open 
all knowledge and all bosoms to one another, for all 
is open to the eye of God. There are no secrets in 



2o6 ELECTRICITY AND 

final nature. We fancy our isolation as children dis- 
semble. If we are good we shall be known by all to be 
so. If we are bad at heart no artful practice can con- 
ceal it ; for the soul radiates by material law ; it speaks 
its honest language like the stars. 

But the most horrible, sudden and agonizing calami- 
ties overtake individuals and communities without an 
instant of warning, and the consternation of sudden 
knowledge of them comes first by the channels of the 
physical senses. A statesman falls dead at a banquet 
under circumstances making it a national misfortune, 
while at that instant his family are in a distant city 
in enjoyment of social festivities, all unapprised of 
their bereavement. The surprise of an army; the 
masked battery; the thief in the night; the stroke of 
the assassin; the holocaust by fire; none of these are 
usually made known by any warning to the victims, or 
after their occurrence, to interested friends. And yet 
this is not inconsistent with the spirit influences. The 
attention is always too engrossed with mortality; we 
are too carnally minded; spiritual laws are not the 
same as physical laws; they relate to each other, but 
the relation is a remote one. Animal life is not in- 
tended for full spiritual communication. To know 
these spirit influences there must be, as in sensuous 
communications, a degree of attention, receptivity and 
fine impressibility. To feel spirit influences our souls 
must be thrown open to inviting conditions, as in gen- 
tle sleep or the calm solitude; they are the still small 



THE RESURRECTION. 207 

voices. We are not yet angels ; it is too early in evolu- 
tion. The intense, clear memory of a departed friend 
may be an indication of that friend's presence. There 
is a great question among the metaphysicians in regard 
to the origin of our impulses. Are not these spirit 
voices or influences sometimes the origin? 

WOMAN AND SPIRITUALISM. 

An educated, cultured, experienced, chastened 
woman, arrived at the age when the follies of life have 
lost their allurement, when the flames of all passions 
have vanished, when her body has ripened away into 
her soul, content with the present, benignly forgiving 
the past, and serenely contemplating the Beyond, is 
truly a spiritual oracle. Educated old men are almost 
always infirm of temperament or eccentric in some way, 
with physical complaints or intellectual hobbies. But 
old women may have the graces of culture with harm- 
lessness. She, more than any other living being, is 
emancipated from mortality into spirituality. As we 
see her calmly looking forward to the sunset of life, 
her face bears the sheen of eternity, her soul is at rest ; 
she poises between this world and the other and the 
transition is happy. With that clear penetration and 
unerring judgment does she regard all human relations 
about her. Unprejudiced and kindly, her heart is sus- 
ceptible to every touch of sympathy and charity; and 
to all the occult forces of nature her temperament is 



2o8 ELECTRICITY AND 

readily sensitive. If there be unseen agencies that 
warn us of the future, if there be intuitions that know 
heart secrets, they are found in the core of her judg- 
ment. To personal magnetism, to psychic influence, 
she is as responsive as the thistle down to the breeze. 

"The sunset of life gives me mystical lore, 
And coming events cast their shadows before." 

— Campbell. 

When old age has arrived to woman and her physical 
conditions are wasted and irresponsive to brutal man, 
when she is in the chimney corner, without power, 
fame, business education or financial independence, 
she then by her own fault and our sensuousness, too 
often becomes a neglected dependent. But with a per- 
sonal history, a life of intellectual achievement and 
moral culture, woman becomes in her last days the 
home's idol as nature intends that she shall be. Her 
heart is fully compensated for its life of yearning love 
and sacrifice. Faith and hope illuminate her face, and 
her final passing becoming the world's sacred example. 
Refined, intelligent and inspiring, debarred ever from 
the vocations and avenues of distinction, her move- 
ments watched and hampered, her genius discouraged 
and her ambition confined, deprived of the power to 
redress her wrongs, woman's life is only imprisonment. 
The only field for her growing soul is in the great 
Beyond. She instinctively feels that there she will be 
emancipated, enfranchised, disenthralled, mated, for 



THE RESURRECTION. 



209 



her soul is too gentle for her environments here. 
Spiritualism becomes her most consoling study and 
practice here; it gives her angelic companions whom 
others do not see. Her faculties in that respect are of 
a higher order than are the faculties of the man. After 
love, spiritualism is her philosophy — her life. She is, 
thus, a safe guide, our leader, our forerunner. 

"I gather this — that the spiritual body is real, is tangi- 
ble, is visible, is human, but that we shall be changed/' 
— The Gates Ajar. 

It is no answer to our proposition of physical touch 
and action and reaction between our living selves, and 
between our departed friends to us, that we so many 
times fail of sensible proof of these things, and that 
they are so infrequent as to amount to no more than 
mere coincidences. Absorbed, covered up and en- 
veloped as we are in materialism, it is only natural 
that the delicacy of spirit essence does not arouse us. 
Some of us are as coarse as brutes. To be influenced 
spiritually we must be taken either when off guard, 
when the mind is balanced finely, and open to this spirit 
aggressiveness, or when trained to the principle by 
sorrow, bereavement or moral culture. We are not 
sensible to the magnetic stream north and south that 
is passing through us all the time, but if our bodies 
were full of magnetic needles we would be. 



210 ELECTRICITY AND 



ti t 



'And did the apparition ever return?* *No, al- 
though I have often invoked it; but then, perhaps, God 
accords privileges to the purity of the child, which He 
refuses to the corruption of the man/ " — The Corsican 
Brothers. 

If the so-called materialization of spirits be not real 
sensible objects, then the visions of them may be sub- 
jective impressions of spiritual objects that are not 
visible to the physical eye, but are to the spiritual eye. 

"The spirit of the departed dead, I am convinced, 
have a certain influence over our minds." — Bishop Bow- 
man. 

That most delicate impression that seems, by the 
faintest interior hint, to restrain one from action in 
the common afifairs of life, that hold-back that seems 
to be without reason, is our best friend. Obey it ; it is 
the fine poise and voice of nature. Women have it in 
truth and fact, but they allow themselves to be per- 
suaded by men, contrary to their intuitional counsels. 
This slightest inclination that we all have felt is one of 
the deepest mysteries of our existence. Whether it is 
divinity within, or some guardian angel without, or 
whether it is sometimes one and sometimes the other, 
we cannot yet demonstrate. We know that it comes 
out of the uttermost depths and that we always err 
when we do not heed it. It is not the bias of coarse 
prejudice or morbid fear, but it is a refinement of 
sense. So it is with some memories. A name, or a 
past idea, is forgotten. The mind searches around at 



THE RESURRECTION, 211 

random to find it^ but without success. At once we 
feel it coming forward out from the distant mists, but 
yet undefinable and unshapen; and as we stand with 
abstracted mood and staring eyes we say, ^'There, I 
have it/' but it recedes again into nothingness. And 
perhaps this is the way that spirits strive and travail 
to gain our attention, only to go back again disap- 
pointed. Perhaps this delicate poise and abstraction 
determines the success of spiritualistic mediums and 
clairvoyants, like Bishop Irving and Charles Foster, 
who were killed outright by a cerebral straining for 
far-distant impressions. Perhaps, after all, this is the 
thin partition that we have to break through to see the 
spirit land and its inhabitants, because they are every 
bit as natural and as near as this physical land is. The 
photographic plate, the spectroscope, and the long dis- 
tance telephone are pioneers. There are stars now 
radiating upon the earth and having their chemical 
influence here that we have not as yet seen, the physical 
revelation of which awaits only the invention of plate 
and lens delicate enough. The savage knows naught 
of the star nor we of the spirit, because neither of us 
has the proper lens. So may there be gentle spirits 
shining upon us from the abyss of eternity that we 
cannot prove until we obtain some mental sensitive 
plate or spiritual spectroscope. 

*'A'm ready noo, an* a'll get ma kiss when mither 
comes; a' wish she wud come, for a'm tired an' wantin* 
tae sleep. 



212 ELECTRICITY AND 

"Yon's her step ... an' she's carryin' a licht in 
her hand; a' see it through the door. 

"Mither, a' kent ye wudna forget yir laddie, for ye 
promised tae come, and a've feenished ma psalm." — 
Bonnie Briar Bush. 

The common mind of to-day is confined as to spirit- 
ual philosophy within an eggshell that will suddenly 
shiver some day and will let us behold an ethereal 
world, all angelic, as certainly and familiarly as we 
know our own world of barbarians and beasts. Wise 
and good people have said that they do not believe there 
ever was a sensible communication from departed 
spirits with any mortal. If the footfalls of our de- 
parted loved ones were as many, though silent, as the 
snowfliakes during our nights of sleep we, in our brute 
condition, would be as unconscious of them. We are 
yet planetary. 

"Our bodily senses take cognizance of no forms of 
matter except those which are in a certain degree of 
condensation. But we reasonably infer the existence 
f of some rarefied and tenuous states of matter. Of 
some such tenuous state the spiritual body may reason- 
ably be inferred to consist. Then its apparition would 
become to us a question, not of the existence of such 
bodies, but of the acuteness of our own perceptive fac- 
ulties. These faculties, in their normal exercise, are too 
coarse and blunt; but under that exaltation of their 
function, which accompanies that shifting of the 
threshold of consciousness of which I have spoken, they 
do become adequate to the perception of such tenuous 
states of matter, so that apparitions, otherwise called 
ghosts, are seen. As I conceive it, the spiritual body, 



THE RESURRECTION, 



213 



_ f 



soul or ghost — by whichever name you choose to call 
it — has no material existence whatever in the ordinary 
sense of the word. That statement raises the whole 
question of the constitution of matter as distinct from 
mind. For my own part I think that no absolute dis- 
tinction is possible. The experiments of such men as 
Clerk Maxwell, William Crookes, and Professor Tyn- 
dall have demonstrated the existence of states of mat- 
ter designated as 'radiant*, in which none of the ordinary 
properties of matter appear." — Dr. Eliot Coues. 

"Milton imagined, and put into words his belief, that 
millions of spiritual creatures walked the earth unseen, 
when we wake or when we sleep. I believe that this 
world of those we call the dead is close by us and all 
around us, and there is a difificulty about that to our 
imaginations only because we are fools of our eyes and 
ears. We fancy that we see all there is; while, as a 
matter of fact, our clear-headed science has taught all 
those who have cared to find out its truth that it is only 
the tiniest part of this universe that we ever see or hear 
— just a little fraction that our senses enable us to ex- 
plore. It has taught us that the mightiest of all the 
physical forces of the world are the invisible forces, the 
intangible forces." — M. J. Savage. 

"The form of man's spirit is the human form. . . . 
This may be seen . . . from the consideration that 
man is man by virtue of his spirit and not by virtue of 
his body; and that the spirit is not added to the cor- 
poreal form, but that the corporeal form is added to the 
spirit; for the spirit is clothed with a body according to 
its own form." — Swedenborg. 

"Granting human electricity to exist, why shall not a 
communication be established like a sort of spiritual 
Atlantic cable between man and man and between him 



214 ELECTRICITY AND 

and the beings of other spheres and other solar sys- 
tems?"— Marie Corelli. 

The true spiritualist is neither lonely nor misan- 
thropic; he or she always has plenty of company. 
When we forget that God and our departed friends are 
near us we become despondent ; but there is an unfail- 
ing source of companionship to the refined and spirit- 
ualized person, which, whether it bje in real communion 
with God and the angels, or imagination, is satisfactory 
to many wise, good, practical and successful people. 

But with the question of the objective and sensuous 
recognition of the departed spirits — ''materialization" 
— it is not necessary to deal fully here. Scientifically 
there may be a departed spirit, the form and shape of 
which we know not, one that may be discerned, felt 
or realized by the mind of mortals objectively, not by 
the physical eyes, but by the spiritual eyes; not only 
subjectively but objectively. 

The universal system of etheric telegraphy connects 
our minds with all things, elevating us in intuitive 
power like the angelic, as we refine our natures to the 
self reading point. 

Not all of the electric current in a telegraphic or 
telephonic message goes by its special conductor to its 
intended receiver. Some of it Is inducted into the at- 
mosphere and into other wires so that others can hear 
and read. So it is in ordinary vision with the mole- 
cular wave to the eye from the outside objects. Not all 
of them go along the optic nerve or other organs of 



THE RESURRECTION. 



215 



perception to our inner consciousness or brain sen- 
sorium. Part of these molecular waves are inducted 
directly to the sensorium, not like the exact expressions 
of the eye or the ear, but by vague influences none the 
less lawful through the all-pervading medium, and we 
interpret them in accordance with our fine poise and 
mental concentration. That is the way in which we 
interpret each other's souls in spite of our words that 
are electrically enveloped by the halo of truth as they 
leave our lips, whether true in themselves or not. 

"What little we know we get through the ear or the 
eye or the nostrils or the taste or the touch; but these 
angels of God have no physical encasement and they 
are all senses. A wall five feet thick is not solid to 
them. Through it they go without disturbing a flake of 
mortar or a crystal of sand. They are at every place. 
They are more numerous on the earth than the whole 
human race; and more than that, there is a guardian 
angel personally for you. I used to think that that was 
all fanciful. I said to myself, That is a very good 
theory, but I can't quite believe that it is certain.' 
From this present study of angology I find it positively 
stated that every soul has a guardian angel." — T. 
DeWitt Talmage. 

Practical electrical induction sustains this theory. 
Between two electric concave discs, making a focus 
midway in space, can be produced a brilliant light. 
And this has been done by Professor Tesla through a 
stone wall. If our souls are electric we thus prove 
their traversing, penetrating and perceptive powers. 



2i6 ELECTRICITY AND 

ORGANIC DENSITIES. 

It IS a fallacy, like the fallacy of the ^^idea" soul, to 
suppose that even all physiologies, or bodies, are alike 
in material density. There is a difference in animal 
bodies of fibre and weight to the cubic inch, a differ- 
ence in physical specific gravity. If there be organized 
beings on other planets, Neptune being lighter than 
water, its people would be correspondingly lighter than 
we. The same law would prevail on other spheres, 
planetoids or nebulous centers, to all degrees of sub- 
tility, whether fluid, gaseous, ethereal or electrical. If 
in the nebulous spaces there be intelligent beings they 
must have forms quite gaseous. The following is an 
approximate grading of the lightness of men upon our 
planets, according to the estimated density of those 
planets, going from the sun. A man would be one- 
fifth as heavy on Earth as on Mercury, one-tenth as 
heavy on Jupiter as on Mercury, one-twentieth as 
heavy on Neptune as on Mercury. If human beings 
occupy Neptune, they would be nearly six times as 
light as men on the earth. And if there are planets be- 
yond Neptune, nearly nebulous or gaseous, they would 
have correspondingly lighter bodies. And so on there 
might be, from our known analogy, realms requiring 
volatile or even ethereal bodies. And thus the ethereal 
spaces will require ethereal bodies. The following 
gradation of planetary densities is quoted : 



THE RESURRECTION, 217 

"Mercury 19. 56 

Venus 5.22 

Earth 5-66 

Mars 5.39 

Jupiter 1.68 

Saturn 0.36 

Uranus 0.69 

Neptune 0.97" 

"All flesh is not the same flesh; but there is one kind 
of flesh of man, another flesh of beasts, another of 
fishes and another of birds; there are also terrestrial 
bodies and bodies celestial." 

With the idea that spirit is an ''immaterial sub- 
stance," one can hardly have patience to deal at this 
age of discovery of universal relations of all substances 
— solid, fluid, gaseous and ethereal. Some writer has 
said: "Whatever is beyond the reach of our physical 
senses is immaterial." Whose ''physical senses," pray? 
Some of us are very dull. All of us are advancing in 
perception; we are progressing in the discovery and 
the analysis of new elements, and by and by we will 
consider nothing to be immaterial or supernatural. 

"No prejudice of the vulgar can be more unphilo- 
sophical than is that which would obstruct for a mo- 
ment our acquiescence in the belief o{ a future transition 
of hwtnan nature with its individuality into a new and 
more refined corporeal structure,^'' — Dr. Isaac Taylor. 

Science furnishes a simple analogy to a material 
heaven that is full of organisms in the well known 



2l8 ELECTRICITY AND 

chemical rarefactions of all substances and elements, 
on to infinity. In the great super-physical spaces there 
are the materials for the formation of everything that 
we now know. The atmosphere is a simple illustra- 
tion at hand. It is said, and proved by the physicists, 
to be ''infinitely elastic.'' There is no such thing as 
the top of the atmosphere or a distinct and ascertain- 
able line between atmospheric space and non-atmos- 
pheric space. As we go toward the center of the earth, 
which is the center of the atmosphere's attraction and 
compression, it becomes more dense; as we go from 
the center it becomes more and more rarefied, onward 
to the border line of the next sphere's influence. Its 
constituent atoms of oxygen and nitrogen are the same, 
but those atoms up there are expanded in size, fitting 
the corresponding increase in the dimensions of space. 
So the atoms of the more solid and physical substances, 
being released from the earth, where all are com- 
pressed into corresponding lesser space, all make one 
perfect amalgam up there which may be ether, not a 
homogeneous element, perhaps, but a perfect amalgam, 
in equilibrium, of diflferent elements or laws of dif- 
ferentiation as we see it in the present world. And 
yet if the elements flux into one homogeneous sub- 
stance, that, with different motions, would account for 
this physical universe. Up there the ether may be the 
atoms themselves released and infinitely expanded, but 
saving their autonomy. As that ethereal substance 
recondenses down here, either by gravitation or some 



THE RESURRECTION. 219 

other unknown law, the anatomized ether finds its way, 
inter-atomic, down here. 

"The more we learn of the actions which take place 
in our own and other suns the more probable it becomes 
that it (the ether) is ordinary matter in an ultra gas- 
eous condition." — J. T. Sprague. 

In this view it may be said that those spaces are the 
most normal location for purely intellectual and spirit- 
ual organisms, as physical nature here is constantly 
at war with them. Our physical evolution is toward 
the angelic. In the beginning, when the universe was 
without form, and void, the various elements existed, 
each distinct, hut in a perfect flux until the creative fiat 
established various centers of attraction which made 
the atoms as we now find them, combined into the 
various suns, planets, meteoric masses, with their liv- 
ing organisms ; so that, when their purpose is finished, 
the Almighty's hand shall be taken away and these 
atoms will diffuse back into their ethereal conditions; 
and then, no matter having been annihilated, but each 
atom infinitely rarefied, will still remain, ready for the 
organizations of forms, angelic and immortal, instead 
of animal and dissoluble. If the oxygen and nitrogen 
atoms of the atmosphere expand, intact in the great 
spaces, so may the atoms of oxygen, hydrogen, carbon 
and nitrogen, phosphorous and sulphur, which make 
up the man's body, expand and be ready to make the 
man again in the rarefied condition. So the material- 




\ 



220 ELECTRICITY AND 

ists need not, after all, get so terribly scared of spooks. 
One good healthy spook is worth a whole lot of decay- 
ing old materialists. They do not believe that Elijah 
or Jesus floated up in the air, but they say that there 
are millions of living germs floating all about us in the 
air. If ether makes atoms, atoms make gases, gases 
make food, why cannot we feed in the ethereal spaces 
directly as well as here, a spiritual body being suited 
to spiritual environment? 

"How mighty are the kingdoms of the air! How 
vast they are, how densely populated, how glorious are 
their destinies, how all-powerful and wise are their in- 
habitants!" — Marie Corelli. 

A MATERIAL HEAVEN. 

Are there conscious entities in the next world? If 
there be they are to have objects of employment and 
pleasure there. And why cannot a flower, or any seed, 
draw its nourishment from the rarefied atoms or ether 
there as it does here ? Science tells us that their tissues 
here are built up from ethereal substances. The scenes 
of this earth are, by roundabout laws, only vanishing 
lantern scenes of things that have come from the ether. 
The discovery of the ether is a great step in theology. 
It opens heaven's gates to the carnal mind. 

*'Heaven is the coronation of all exquisite colors, a 
great orchard of beauty, an infinite garden of divine 
floriculture. I do not know but that there may be a 



K 



THE RESURRECTION. 221 

material heaven as well as a spiritual heaven. I shall 
not be at all chagrined if, waking up from the last 
sleep, I found in the Better Land hyacinths and came- 
lias and violets and pansies." — Dr. T. DeWitt Talmage. 

Let us continue and repeat, to fix it in the mind, the 
interesting and instructive analogy; it is the basic 
argument of spirituality. As I see that my memory or 
mental ego inheres practically in the substance of my 
body, which is the union of the atoms of the various 
elements, I cannot say that my memory or mental ego 
will not as naturally inhere in the one parent element — 
the ether — out of which these various elements have 
been differentiated, and into which they will become 
again more perfectly amalgamated. Our best scientists 
say that there is an ether. None can say that it does 
not contain, in a rarefied state, all physical elements 
and the atoms of the constituent elements of our 
bodies; namely, oxygen, carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, 
phosphorus and sulphur. Neither can they say that 
there will not be a living sentient organism of those 
same elements, rarefied and expanded in the realms re- 
mote from the physical spheres. It would more nat- 
urally seem that as physical organisms here are perish- 
able here — that is to say, dissolvable — the ether which 
is not perishable could contain mind, which has a per- 
sistent character. The persistence of hope and the per- 
sistence of matter fit each other. So, scientifically 
speaking, there is no absurdity in claiming a spiritual 
body "raised ;'' which is only a physical body rarefied. 



\/ 



/ 



222 ELECTRICITY AND 

If the air atoms infinitely expand, so may also the 
atoms of our physical bodies expand into the amalga- 
mated ether and there form organisms as well as here. 
So, after all, the question of a spiritual body comes 
within the ordinary and simple law of physical rarefac- 
tion or metamorphosis. It takes myriads of atoms of 
the six elements here to make up a man ; so there 
it may take only one atom of each of the six elements 
to make an angel. We shall need the different ele- 
ments there for individual bodily recognition. It 
would seem to be more natural there, because the 
source of life is there. Organized beings of an ethereal 
electrical nature would meet our aspirations more than 
we, confined as we are in our ''muddy investiture." 
What was the necessity of physical life at all ? 

"These things which we call elements are not of un- 
changing duration. The earth, dissolving, distills into 
flowing water, the water, too, co-operating, departs into 
the breezes of the air; its weight being removed again, 
the most subtle air shoots upwards into the fires of the 
ether on high. Thence do they return back again and 
the same order is unravelled. In this universe, so vast, 
nothing perishes, but it varies and changes its appear- 
ance; and for a thing to begin to be something different 
\from which it was before is called 'being born'; and to 
'Cease to be the same thing is called 'dying.' One born 
of the blood of Inlus shall make it the mistress of the 
world. After the earth shall have enjoyed his presence, 
the ethereal shall gain him again and heaven shall be 
his destination." — Ovid's Metamorphoses, XV, 2 and 3. 



THE RESURRECTION. 223 

Aristotle described soul as "The first form of an 
organized body that has life." How can he give ''form" 
and ''body" to an idea? When Christ was seen by 
his disciples walking on the water it is said that they 
were sore afraid because they had seen a "spirit." 
How could a "spirit" be seen if it was only an idea or 
a consciousness and not a substance ? 

A LOOK INTO ETERNITY. 

^'Before the last breath is drawn, celestial visions may- 
be granted to dying saints. On no other principle can 
the transported looks, triumph, language and direct in- 
telligent address with which godly persons have left 
this world be interpreted/' — Dr. John McFarlan. 

Our limits will not permit the narration of the many 
beautiful facts of this kind having occurred within 
this orthodox minister's experience. 

An humble mother said that when her babe died it 
"Looked as if it saw something." The materialist can- 
not prove that it did not, with all their talk of "reflex 
molecular impression" and "subjectivities," or the 
"stimulus of carbonic acid gas in the lungs," etc. The 
belief of the mother, the eye-witness, is quite as ra- 
tional as the beHef of the physicists who are not there. 
What has a babe six months old ever seen here to give 
its countenance the expression of seeing an angel or to 
give it reflex impressions ? The vision may have been 
an inherited impression, but those impressions of the 
babe, and of the adult, dying, are too perfect and in- 



224 ELECTRICITY AND 

tense to be from vague heredities. The dying mind 
may construct beauties ; our dreams may enwrap us in 
scenes of dehght; and there may be imparted to the 
nerve organization of the infant reflex emotions of the 
parents. But after all that is considered, there come 
in the dying hours, as witnessed by many, and in our 
own negative and passive states of mind, new visions 
too heavenly and unspeakably beautiful to bear any re- 
lation to any human experience or to any family his- 
tory. 

The Colorado Republic speaks of a little child two 
and a half years old, who daily made exclamations 
about seeing its little sister and its grandmother who 
had died. 

The New York Tribune, in July, 1883, contains an 
account of two ladies in Louisville who were intimate 
friends but separated at some distance, dying at the 
same time, and each one expressing her conviction that 
the other was dying. 

[From a Lecture by the Reverend J. Cooke:] 

"Louisa May Alcott, watching with her mother by 
the deathbed of a dearly loved sister, says, when the 
I end came she distinctly saw a delicate mist rising from 
» the dead body. Her mother, too, saw this strange 
thing. When the mother asked the physician about it 
he said, *You saw life departing visibly from the physical 
form.* This was at Concord, you will remember, where 
there is no superstition. 

"Professor Hitchcock says that he was present at the 
bedside of a dying friend. The eyes closed; the breath 



THE RESURRECTION. 



22$ 



ceased; he was dead. Suddenly the eyes opened, light 
came back to them, then a look of surprise, admiration, 
inexpressible bliss; then suddenly passed away. 

"Doctor Oliver Wendell Holmes, in the preface to a 
book on visions, with all a scientist's conservatism, 
says that his friend Dr. Clarke said that once while 
watching by a deathbed the impression was conveyed to 
- 1 him that 'something' — that is the word he used — 
passed from the body into space." 

[From Sir Walter Scott:] 

"The general, or it may be termed, the universal be- 
lief of the inhabitants of the earth, in the existence of 
spirits, separated from the incumbrances and incapaci- 
ties of the body, is grounded on the consciousness of 
divinity that speaks in our bosoms and demonstrates to 
all men, except the few who are hardened to the celes- 
\ tial voice, that there is within us a portion of the divine 
- substance which is not subject to the law of death and 
dissolution. . . . The conviction that such an inde- 
structible essence exists must infer the existence of 
many millions of spirits who have not been annihilated, 
though they may have become invisible to mortals who 
still hear, see and perceive only by means of the im- 
perfect organs of humanity/' 

Thus, taking the sensitiveness of the human mind 
and presuming its electric nature, we can comprehend 
clairvoyance, mind reading, etc., however much those 
phenomena have been depopularized, and we can also, 
from the many social phenomena that we accept, reason 
out that the body of the mind is electric. And if the 
mind be ethereal or electric and lives after bodily dis- 
solution, we can easily comprehend the electric in- 
fluence of the departed over us when we open our- 



226 ELECTRICITY AND 

selves sympathetically to them, and that they may be 
literally our guardian angels. If the mind uses elec- 
tricity as its immediate agent, a theory now generally 
accepted, then the ever beautiful and interesting phe- 
nomena of the magnet and the glass is worthily illus- 
trative of it. 

Philosophy will not attempt to limit the distance of 
that magnetic power in that hand-magnetized bar, 
however slight. So if the soul is magnetic or has a 
magnetic agent, we can infer that its tender and in- 
visible agencies work upon us ; and although we may 
at times be unconscious of them, we cannot deny their 

ultimate power. Though they may touch us with 
yearning and affection, they may find no response from 
our too conscious mortality. The fault is with us, not 
with the spirits. 

"There are seasons when the soul seems to recognize 
the presence of and hold communion with the de- 
parted. Who shall say that at such times there is not a 
real communion between the living and the dead?"-^ 
Bishop D. W. Clarke. 

"They err who tell us that the spirit, unclothed 
And from its mortal tabernacle loosed, 
Has neither lineament of countenance 
Nor limit of ethereal mould nor form 
Of spiritual substance. . . . 
The angels are but spirits, a flame of fire 
And subtle as the viewless winds of heaven; 
Yet they are to each other visible, 
And beautiful with those original forms 
That crowned the morn of their nativity." 

— Bickersteth. 



THE RESURRECTION. 227 

If they are ''forms'' they cannot escape the analysis 
of our science. 

'Trofessor Broferio, who took the 10,000 franc prize 
offered by the ItaHan Government for the best scientific 
article, said that the 'easiest and most probable way to 
account for the phenomena (spiritual) collectively was 
to call them the work of spirits.' " — Baltimore Sun 

SPIRITUALISM IS ABNORMAL. 

Even were it logically and scientifically true and 
clearly apparent that disembodied ethereal spirits exist 
all about us, yet it would be a wise provision of nature 
if we were denied familiarity with them, else we would 
be too indifferent to this life, its duties and its full 
animal evolution. This is the supernatural that theo- 
logians demand. One thing at a time and contentment 
with the course of nature. Could we see our dear de- 
parted walking by our side, or look across to the 
Shining Shore, we would be apt to become slothful in 
our planetary relations. We should not encourage 
premature spiritual development any more than we 
should hasten old age. The pursuit of spiritualism is 
an unhealthy business. It diminishes our interest in 
every other subject. 

The more susceptible a soul becomes the more it 
seems to let go of mortality and to weaken the fleshly 
link. The penalty for this advance into the future is 
a loss of physical and secular energy. Spiritualists are 
advanced scouts and explorers for mankind and they 



228 ELECTRICITY AND 

have to take the usual consequences. But in proportion 
to our true spiritual faith we are prepared to meet 
death, to meet it for ourselves or our beloved with 
smiling tranquillity, knowing that the dissolution of 
the body is only a change of condition, not an ex- 
tinction. 

In the intimate personal relations of life we could 
not know one another as we do, to a certainty, with- 
out this sure means of magnetic induction. We know 
that our conjugal partner is true, our servant is honest, 
our business associates are not robbers in disguise. 
Our souls have actually touched theirs. This ether 
penetrates every heart, every prison cell, every cavern 
of the sea, every nook and recess of the land, and 
vibrates back their messages to those who are refined 
enough to read. 

INSTINCT AND INTUITION. 

As electrical induction goes directly through space 
without any circumscribed conductor, so may the con- 
sciousness come directly in contact with the objective 
universe, mental and physical. This would account 
for instinct and intuition in many of their phenomena. 
The uncarnated angels know things by direct spiritual 
cognition or touch. All of our five senses are only 
contributory to the one eye of the soul which is like 
a ball-mirror that, theoretically, reflects the whole uni- 
verse. We cognize, within our limitations, as God does. 
The soul feels its knowledge. By sympathy and the 



THE RESURRECTION, 229 

etheric medium every soul has contact with everything 
else, spiritual and material. It is a certain law, as yet 
undeveloped and not understood ; and great success in 
life will come from the art of so balancing and purify- 
ing the mind as to detect the still small voice. The 
most sensitive photographic plate will receive an im- 
press from stars as yet unknown to science or to the 
best lenses. Photography can receive impress from 
objects through another opaque body. So every soul 
has its X-ray. The scientific method so-called is not 
the only avenue of progress in knowledge and science. 
The present reaction from the deductive method to the 
inductive has become a sort of weak fad. There is 
snobbery, pretence and "bluff" even among scientists ; 
all men are liars — without any exception. The ambi- 
tion, vanity and straining for effect among profes- 
sional miCn is amusing. We are born with mental 
knowledge as we are born with physical traits. In 
our study both induction and deduction should be pre- 
served in reciprocal balance. "Science has its imagina- 
tion.'' "Intuition is the headlight of science.'' In- 
duction^ which is establishing general principles from 
facts is called reasoning upward. Deduction, which is 
supposing facts from our internal knowledge of first 
principles, either inherited or received directly from 
God and the spirits, is called reasoning downward. 
This is intuition. Deduction is the habit of superior 
minds, born geniuses. Induction is the world's totter- 
ing forward, like the child, holding upon the chairs 



230 



ELECTRICITY AND 



and the walls. Newton guessed a good deal, and 
guessed rightly. Intuitive knowledge is the storage in 
the heart of all time. Intuition is a flashlight ; science 
is an inch worm. 

''Newton*s prudence in avoiding experiments was 
due simply to the clearness of his intuitions." — Alton D. 
Adams. 



THE RESURRECTION. 



231 



CHAPTER X. 

^^THERE IS A SPIRITUAL BODY/^ 

Thou God seest me — Prayer is spiritual breathing — Funeral 
reforms — The soul is tangible — God around us like an atmos- 
phere — An ideal soul for all — Soul hygiene — Daily manna 
in the concrete — The prophecy of the heart. 

From the foregoing chapters we have concluded that 
recognizing a spiritual body as a material substance is 
the sum of all human philosophy and interests. Those 
who have attained to that understanding have 
triumphed over all human problems and difficulties, 
have found the philosopher's stone, and have placed 
the pleasures, the other achievements and knowledge 
of the earth in the realms of minor considerations. 
Besides being a rational religion it will be found a prac- 
tical aid in life. It enables one to detect abnormal 
social infections and to evade them; to gauge the 
weapons before invisible and unknown, striking at the 
soul and character, and to either parry or encounter 
them ; to know secret human vampires and to shun or 
destroy them. We have the powers of discretion, isola- 
tion and defense. We may not be able to compete with 
a stronger nature, but we can hide and flee. If we 
cannot cope with Napoleons and Caesars, we can de- 



232 



ELECTRICITY AND 



cline their company ; and we can apply this philosophy 
in holding our affinities to our souls "with hooks of 
steel." With it we have nurtured our children. Our 
sustaining sympathy has kept them with us as we 
have walked with them down into the valley of the 
shadow and back. 

Adopting this belief that the soul is a separate sub- 
stantial organism and one that operates by material 
law, one will find it grow upon him and it will be 
illustrated and confirmed at every step of life. It will 
do him no harm ; nothing but good. It will explain to 
him mysterious social influences, and will enable him 
day by day to strengthen his will as he does his 
physical frame, and it will open up wondrous fields of 
life, power and satisfaction. Above all he can stand 
with self-poise in the madness of the multitude whose 
passions are stirred by the slightest germ of psychic 
effervescence, and he can measure himself against 
crowding impulses and domineering wills all about 
him. It is a direct means of strengthening the soul by 
recognizing it in the category of tangible things. The 
ever-present recognition of the soul-body within our 
physical body, not subject wholly to physical appetites 
or mere animal faculties, strengthens the moral sense 
and character. By regarding the soul as a real thing, 
belonging to concrete science, we make it a practical 
and scientific or artistic subject of never-ending im- 
provement. A great soul cannot he made through 
vice, crime, and violation of simple nature. Virtue, 



THE RESURRECTION. 



233 



temperance, rest, peace, fresh air, labor, a rational life 
even without high education, will make magnetic 
power or quantity and fibre of soul substance. The 
soul is not a being of supernatural extension or limit- 
less capacity for draughts of service; it is a material 
creature; it needs to be fed, conserved and protected 
like the body. 

And this philosophy relates also to man's spiritual 
and moral good. The doctrine of a material and pres- 
ent God gives us a natural religion and expounds our 
former faith ; it is a real connecting link between earth 
and heaven, between moral law and physical law. God 
about us, in our presence, not somewhere else, is a 
stronger influence than a conjectured God. The plant 
needs the actual contact of the sunshine, not the mere 
possession of a theory about sunshine. Man needs a 
God that can assimilate with him; needs the bodily ; 
presence of God as he needs the bodily presence of a ^ 
friend. One can hardly, if this reasoning has taken 
hold of his mind, escape a comforting and abiding 
spiritual code as well as an increased faith in Revela- 
tion. God's presence is as real and tangible to the true 
spiritualist as a sun bath is to the atheist; it is the 
highest form of religion. 

"The spirit of God is the Holy Ghost, and the Holy- 
Ghost fills the whole world. There is no place where 
He is not, because, being God, He is boundless and 
omnipresent." — Cardinal Manning. 



234 ELECTRICITY AND 

Does the Cardinal mean that the idea of God fills 
the whole world ? How can an idea ^^fill" anything or 
have any space or locality, except as it is allied to 
matter ? 

'The inward man may be renewed day by day; and 
it is not strictly a natural process, but he is brought in 
spiritual contact with God that supplies a renewal, a 
freshness, a perennial youth. God is around me like an 
atmosphere."— Dr. R. R. Meredith. 

*^God with us'' — not as a conjecture or metaphor, 
but as a concrete fact — is the only basis of true re- 
ligion. Recognizing Him as a surroundmg and pene- 
trating ether will compel one to live as though walking 
hand in hand with the most exalted human personage. 
^ Strike a drop of quicksilver ; you shall see that, by the 
presence of God's will, it instantly flies into lesser per- 
fect spheres like those of the heavens, showing God 
is there. Dr. Edward Beecher, in the ripeness of his 
ninetieth year, prayed, "We know that Thou, O God, 
I art with us, not in general, but personally, and in and 
about us." But theologians generally have never at- 
tempted to say how God is in and about us, and there- 
j fore people do not believe them. The mere idealism of 
I God and the soul will never foster anything but agnos- 
ticism or despairing infidelity. This kind of pantheism 
is not inconsistent with the personality of God. 

'The physical universe is, without figure of speech, 
the body of God. You see God as plainly as you see 
your fellow-men, no more and no less." — Rev. John 
Scudder. 




THE RESURRECTION, 



THE COPULA OF IMMORTALITY. 



235 



If, according to accepted science, ultimate matter 
persists eternally, then matter and mind taken to- 
gether make a continuing individuality by mere voli- 
tion. The persistence of abstract mind, whether it be 
a property of matter or independent of it, can be easier 
comprehended than the persistence of disparate, life- 
less matter; in fact the application of the term *'per- 
sistence'' has been borrowed from psychology as ap- 
plied to physics. Dead matter cannot persist; only 
mind pel'sists. If philosophers would go a step far- 
ther and say the "mentality" of matter instead of the 
persistence of matter, they would be clearer. The 
materialists, by discovering the immortality of matter, 
have supplied the spiritualist with partial proof as to 
the immortality of the soul. The animal body dis- 
solves, separates, because it is composite ; but the ether 
being ultimate, primitive, homogeneous and elementally 
persistent^ and its occupancy of the body being an- 
atomically demonstrated as the nerve fluid, with its 
connections, it can be cohered and continued as an in- 
dividual mass after the dispersion of the body, by the 
volition of the mind that inhabits that ether, as is in 
and of it by nature. Do our infants and idiots who are 
without hope or positive morality persist? Probably 
not unless by reflex heredity, or from the sustaining 
power of our love and sympathy that follow them. 
But whether they persist or not is not necessary to be 



236 ELECTRICITY AND 

considered in this argument. The fittest probably 
survive in the Beyond as they do here. Why not? 
We give up and forget our beloved here; why may 
we not there? Not all seeds that drop into the earth 
send up life again. 

If, in the next world, life is parallel in all respects 
to this^ no violence would be done to its laws or to 
our reason. That we on this planet are given certain 
forms is of an import that is quite as slight as myste- 
rious. That in the future life we may have forms 
and organs similar to our present ones, or to be organ- 
less clouds, or halos of ether, recognizing our individ- 
ual differentiations by some now unknown law of men- 
tal apparency, is also a speculation that does not 
militate against the above argument of personal per- 
sistence after bodily death. We can as easily compre- 
hend a nexus of mentality or consciousness with the 
ether as we can with the physical material of the body. 
So, that ether may, after all, be the soul we are looking 
for, and the body of the Very God. We have been 
looking for wireless telegraphy six thousand years 
and only just found it, although it was always ready 
just at our hand. Mental telegraphy — telepathy — mes- 
merism was its archetype. In this etheric domain may 
yet be found the solution of the Resurrection. 

As to ourselves, our continuity of form, or organic 
identity, would seem to depend also upon moral fit- 
ness — upon hope, aspiration, joy, love and ambition. 
With this new material-spiritualism we must live as 



THE RESURRECTION. 



237 



though in houses of glass, for there is about us the 
watch and care of our loved ones. If we could not, 
when they were in the body, requite them for their 
love or suffering, we can now so live as to please their 
more exalted sense. This every-day belief will trans- 
form the world into a paradise. 

Love is attended by chemical ethereal afifinity ; it em- 
braces all other faculties. Whom shall we meet in 
the Beyond to enjoy is the greatest of human aspira- 
tions. A human being without desire for companion- 
ship, left to remorse, shame, hate, despair, may per- 
haps commit soul suicide. Existence under normal 
conditions is a pleasure. All are glad of being born. 
Holiness, Faith, Hope constitute the natural propul- 
sion and desire to live that carries us across the line 
from mortality to immortality. But those qualities 
cannot go forward alone; they must have a material 
basis to ride with or upon. In one who lives a nat- 
ural life, that is a life in accordance with God's law, 
there is by nature a blissful enjoyment of mere being, 
a love and tenacity of mere existence. If the natural 
imperishability requires desire united to it in sufficient 
degree to keep the soul-form together, then the degree 
of desire to live depends upon inducement to live. Moral 
and intellectual energy is necessary to sustain material 
continuity up to the enduring point. Hope is material 
and moral energy alloyed. Hope joined with the per- 



238 ELECTRICITY AND 

sistence of matter constitute the logical copula of Res- 
urrection. 

My loving, consciousness dog, who, I believe, has 
much mind, and whose fidelity is divine, may become 
reincarnated or divided around among other animals, 
and even among men, or may dissipate into the mass 
of organized mind along with subdivisions of his soul 
substance ; but he will not live again as a dog-ego be- 
cause he has no hope, no expectation, no desire, no 
revelation, no reaching forward, no mind beyond the 
present instant, no moral momentum, no spiritual ten- 
acity, not soul enough to resist the outside destructive 
influences that beset it, no moral nature by heredity. 
There is as much difference between the soul of a dog 
and that of a man as there is between their mouths. 
What mind the brute has is immediate, and not in- 
tended for immortality. But the idiot, lunatic or 
infant still beloved may have from heredity a resur- 
rective germ, sustained and built up as it is by out- 
side sympathy. The most intelligent animals are con- 
fined to a very few perceptions and to a narrow and 
limited intellectual and moral range that is entirely in- 
stinctive. They have a mere dream existence, with- 
out guiding judgment or motive, utterly aimless and 
hopeless, taking no thought for an hour in advance. 
In heaven there will not be needed the dog-watchful- 
ness nor yet the help of the horse. 



THE RESURRECTION. 239 

HOPE. 

Hope is the intense and Godly condition of the soul 
of man. It Hfts us out of the clod ; it reaches beyond 
ephemeral life into futurity; its existence as a faculty 
demonstrates futurity. Love is spiritual impulse ; Hope 
is spiritual life itself. All our wordly existence is one 
chain or succession of hopes and expectations. It is 
to the soul what blood is to the body, or what cohesion 
is to matter. It becomes a continuous power that car- 
ries us across all the breaks of discouragement, of un- 
consciousness in sleep, coma, or in death. Hope's 
projecting effect is by a law similar to that which 
awakens us at any set hour of the night, by pre- 
determination, like the alarm clock; or to the law by 
which we can revive at will the consciousness of a past 
event. It is the instinct of the beyond, of progress, 
of continuousness, of activity, of motion, of life, of 
expectancy, the very essence of sentient existence; a 
proof that life is a blessing. Without it we would, 
even here stagnate and die. It comes of rational and 
natural living. It constitutes the main difference be- 
tween the man and the brute. Human hearts in all 
grades, in the middle of barbarism, of pauperism and 
in the slums as well as on the throne, pulsate and reach 
for something next, something better. Hope keeps the 
germ of resurrection alive. It comes of innate goodly 
life and it joins the will for self-preservation. Hope 
turns sorrow into joy, night into day, dying into liv- 



240 



ELECTRICITY AND 



ing ; it is a condition of unperverted life as health is a 
result of spiritual hygiene. Hope and the moral ele- 
ments are the cement of the soul's substance that keep 
the soul from disintegrating, as attraction is the cement 
that keeps the atoms together. Wanting morality, the 
soul-substance disperses with every diversity of out- 
ward attack, cause and circumstance into a diffused re- 
incarnation. Without hope, prayer and immortal as- 
piration, man's individuality is like a bubble upon the 
sea, ready to snap out and fuse back into the ocean of 
the soul. Hope is the salt of spiritual and physical 
life that prevents putrefaction. It is the mainspring 
of energy. We hope each minute to live during the 
next. 

"Take away hope and you make life worse than cru- 
elty." — Wm. Jennings Bryan. 

At each breath we hope and expect to respire again. 
It is ambition, freshness, animation. In proportion as 
we have it is there success and courage. It is a revivi- 
fying and spiritualizing influence. It preserves the 
body in this life as it impels the soul forward into the 
next. Hopeful families remain the longest unbroken ; 
hopeful individuals live the longest. But vice, crime 
and carnality destroy hope and a desire for resurrec- 
tion. It is the one immortal faculty, the dividing line 
between man and brute. 



THE RESURRECTION, 241 

"For we are saved by Hope.'* — St. Paul. 

''Hope, that makes transparent the veil of the future, 
that brings pouring into our souls the very glories of 
eternity." — Dr. Meredith. 

"From the voiceless lips of the unreplying dead there 
comes no word; but in the night of death Hope sees a 
star." — Col. Robert Ingersoll. 

We are led to believe in a future state of happiness as 
a natural result or sequence of a correct life, not as an 
arbitrary gift or reward. What we shall have after 
death will he in the chain of cause and effect, com- 
mencing here and continuing there. Nothing is claimed 
of a future state that is not analogous with what we 
have now. 

"Progressive evolution of the intellect and moral na- 
ture is the destiny of individuals; the knowledge, attain- 
ments and experience of earth-life forming the basis of 
spirit-life." — Swedenborg. 

There is an involuntary persistence in mind, espe- 
cially in moral qualities, just the same as there is per- 
sistence in matter. A virile ancestry continues through 
its descendants its mental and moral qualities that ride 
upon some material medium. In the same way the 
moral qualities of each individual continue riding 
upon the material soul and preserving its identity by 
moral and material persistence across the chasm of 
physical dissolution. 



242 ELECTRICITY AND 

"We must live as Christ lived here so as to cstablisl 
the vital conditions for rising there. — Whiton. 

It is enquired, ''What about those who die without 
hope ?" The answer is that the immediateness of hope 
and virtue just before dissolution is not so essential 
as a lifelong hope or inherent character ; a substantial 
stock of virility and constitution of spirit, like the 
virility and constitution of seeds. Roman Catholic the- 
ology recognizes this principle in continuing the sym- 
pathy of the living across the line with the dead, by 
prayers to the saints, and in propelling the soul across 
the boundary of death in the dying moment by the sight 
and grasp of the crucifix as the last thing and the last 
thought on earth. This is entirely rational and logical 
in spiritual philosophy. In the living seed there is a 
living and a dynamic force ; so in soul-seed. Mayhap 
spiritual resurrection will be prevented, analogously as 
physical birth may be, by moral gestative feebleness, 
and souls may fall into the other world still-born and 
then dissolve. Unless the soul substance is cohered 
by hope and morals, proving a reason for existence, it 
may dissipate into the cosmos as believed by the 
Buddhists, who are exhausted by sensualism and thus 
have no hope. 

THERE ARE NO DEAD. 

This philosophy helps to solve the mystery of death, 

to take away its "sting,'' to dispel its blackness and to 

lake it a portal of attractiveness. There is probably 



THE RESURRECTION. 243 

no loss of consciousness by those who are physically 
dying, however they may appear to us. There is never 
any necessary change or decline of this soul from its 
maximum degree of development during life, on 
through bodily dissolution, although there may be de- 
cline in power of expression. We resurrect instantly 
upon bodily death. 

Our race cannot boast of moral progress, or even of 
respectable development, while death is regarded with 
barbaric horror. In this respect our so-called matter- 
of-fact men and practical men are in the worst plight. 
With all our boasted civilization there is not to-day in 
our school curriculums of civilization, any more than in 
savagery, anything about the only absolutely universal 
thing about life — bodily death. The Beyond is void 
except for Revelation or a new philosophy. It is high 
time that this smart business world were casting about 
for the science of the resurrection, to lead it away from 
its ultra-materialism. It is unworthy of the race not 
to have one primary, practical and universal doctrine 
in respect of our future. Is it not, come to think 
earnestly about it, astounding that outside of the Bible 
we have been without even a hope or a suggestion? 
And how few regard the Bible. But a delusion would 
be better than no belief, for that would set up a moral 
system and hold the world to a sense of good order and 
responsibility. Without the moral influence of a future 
life society would rot. Old men who are "kings of 
finance'' and ''props'' in the business centers continue 



244 ELECTRICITY AND 

in their counting rooms treading the wheel of business 
and materialism to the last to shut out from their sight 
the gates of the tomb or to brace themselves against 
its fancied chill. If they want to "keep busy in order 
to live'' they might "go about doing good;" or study 
spirituality instead of aggrandizing money. We know 
that death is inevitable; then why not recognize it as 
a familiar, pleasant and welcome number in the pro- 
gramme of our existence? Why object to death any 
more than to birth? Both are steps in the order of 
progress. Why is not its philosophy as elemental in 
our common schools as any other science ? Why is not 
old age regarded as a tranquil sunset and an approach 
to a welcome rest? 

"All his prospects brightening to the last, 

His Heaven commences ere the world be past.'* 

And why, likewise, is not death regarded, not as the 
sum of all calamities, but as a removal to a country 
villa by an ambitious family, or a retirement from busi- 
ness by a hopeful merchant? Why should not our 
lives be a practical, joyous and halcyon preparation for 
those other realms that science tells us cannot be anni- 
hilated? The world will come to this philosophy at 
last. The distance between our here and our hereafter 
is as thin and as passive as the tgg shell through which 
the bird pecks its own way into the outer world of air, 
sunshine and pleasure. 



THE RESURRECTION. 245 



SOUL DOMINANT. 

In Europe's cathedrals, where the organ is con- 
structed indefinably into the general architecture, and 
where the performer is never seen, the symphonies float 
with religious inspiration mysteriously, from arch to 
arch, round shrine and altar, through nave and tran- 
sept, the whole temple of God and the very air seeming 
one heavenly expression of music. We know that the 
organ and the church are only wood and metal, the 
work of men's hands, and that they could not give forth 
this sentiment of themselves; but we know that near 
and unseen is the living master of its expression. 
Should the organ become a wreck, the musician is still 
there, but he is powerless to stir our feelings or to 
give proof that he has such powers. Our body becomes 
shaky, rusty, cracked, a wreck, but the performer is 
near, unseen, with powers never diminished. What 
we have estimated as intellectual senility or idiocy or 
dementia has been only the retreat of the mind — its 
obscuration by bodily decay. As it sinks below the 
horizon of our sensuous perceptions it is like the setting 
sun that still continues to shine somewhere. No more 
shall the strong man say that the soul is dying with the 
body of the aged and sick than he shall say that his 
own soul is dying when he lies down upon his couch 
after the exhaustion of the day's work. 

The bitterness of bereavement and of loneliness in 



246 ELECTRICITY AND 

the flesh is dispelled by this belief that keeps our angels 
near us and the shining shore in sight, without unduly 
surrendering physical law and the healthfulness of this 
'^temple." When a most loved one is torn from our 
heart by death, when parent sacrifices a proud son to 
uphold the nation's flag, how can we reconcile it all? 
By answering, There is no death! 

Knowing by science that we can never die, what 
happy, unconcerned lives we might have here, taking 
no thought for the morrow and believing that this 
world is peopled with the souls of our beloved. This 
reasoning meets the Bible. The psycho-materialist 
meets the religionist who has arrived at immortal as- 
piration first by the short cut of Faith. But our men 
of "material prosperity,'' who so patronize us all, are 
by their example robbing earth of its happiness. They 
pursue business, only, until they flicker away like a 
candle end, and it is doubtful if there is enough spirit- 
ual carbon in them left to be relit. The stock 
boards, gold boards and exchanges, with all their com- 
fortable pride and wordly success, are like shaved- 
headed bedlamites who ought to wear masks for mere 
shame and guilt. With mercenary frenzy they shriek 
like lunatics and froth like wild boars ; but after 'change 
they take high places in society. Are not the dissi- 
pated fortunes, the deserted mansions, the scattered 
families and the inevitable death of society's "leaders" 
sufficient reminders that there is no lasting character 
in the objects of their desperate contests, their vexa- 



THE RESURRECTION. 247 

tions, weariness and insomnia ? Do they not see that 
they tumble prematurely into their graves, beaten, 
failures at last ? They are blind as brutes to all spirit- 
ual law. Then what is success ? It is leisure and hap- 
piness here and a life Beyond. 

We are not at the top of wisdom and discernment. 
We shall not be developed to our full capacity until we 
stand on the earth and look into a spiritual heaven as 
we have done into the sidereal systems. We shall yet 
do this and we shall yet know God and the angels as 
we now know astronomy. As we have in our schools 
studied and believed in the physical and political 
geography of the earth, we will yet map out the 
heavens. 

"We are blind to the nearness of the spiritual world. 
Theology is to blame for this because it has ever been 
striving for a transcendent method, and a far-off land." 
— Eliza Lamb Martyn. 

THE NEW HEAVENS AND THE NEW EARTH. 

Dr. Thomas Chalmers of Glasgow, an eminent ortho- 
dox authority, in a sermon on 'The New Heaven," 
records himself as believing in a material heaven ; and 
the following eloquent quotation has a character of 
science as well as of revelation : 

"No, my brethren, the object of the administration we 
sit under is to extirpate sin, but it is not to sweep away 
materialism. By the convulsions of the last day it may 



248 ELECTRICITY AND 

be shaken and broken down from its present arrange- 
ments; and with a heat so fervent as to melt its most 
solid elements, it may be utterly dissolved. And thus 
may the earth again become 'without form and void/ 
but without one particle of its substance going into an- 
nihilation. Out of the ruins of this second chaos may 
another earth and another heaven be made, and a new 
materialism with other aspects of beauty and magnifi- 
cence emerge from the wreck of this mighty transfor- 
mation and the world be peopled as before with varieties 
of material loveliness, and space be again lighted up 
into a firmament of material splendor. We are now 
walking on a terrestrial surface not more compact, per- 
haps, than the one which we shall walk on; and we are 
now wearing terrestrial bodies not firmer and more 
solid than the ones we shall hereafter wear. Instead of 
being transferred to some abode of dimness and mys- 
tery, so remote from human experience as to be beyond 
all human comprehension, we shall walk forever in a 
land resplendent with those sensible delights and those 
sensible glories, which we doubt not will lie profusely 
scattered over the new heavens and the new earth." 

When the soul becomes emancipated of its animal 
habitation it assumes the form of its own spiritual tem- 
perament and ideal. In heaven the crooked straighten 
themselves; the blind see; the deaf hear; the lame 
walk ; the black are made as white as they will want to 
be. The resurrection of "the" body would resurrect 
all bodily infirmities, but the resurrection of a spiritual 
form would be a blessing and the realization of the 
utmost longing of every human soul. The soul's form 
will be as perfect and plastic as our own ideal can make 
it, for it will have the same elements there as it has 



THE RESURRECTION. 



249 



here. Oh, ye maimed and broken ones of the earth, 
ye shall be as you wish to be up there. Loosened from 
the fetters of earthly form, there shall your imagina- 
tion mould up your own new body of beauty. 

"The soul will know neither deformity nor pain." — 
Emerson. 

'The soul will never grow old." — Longfellow. 

By this philosophy, through plain or aged features 
we shall see the comely form within; we shall know 
that father and mother are nearing their eternal youth 
and that they shall be as handsome there as they are 
kind and loving here. 

As all the earth was perverted, so our bodies were 
cursed by the sin and fall of Adam. But the soul has 
struggled always for a better condition. The soul is 
dominant. Yonder, between his attendants, totters to- 
ward his office a citizen ninety-five years old. To the 
stranger he is inane, senile ; but we look backward on 
that very street to the time when he was its life and 
power, lithe of limb and bright of eye, and when his 
voice was felt in the halls of Congress. Talk to him 
now^ and the soul and memory are there yet ; his mind 
kindles up in converse but his agent of expression 
— his body — is worn out. So only in appearance 
is he senile. The partnership between soul and 
body has ceased to be profitable and dissolution will 
soon follow. An old sailor once said, on looking at 



250 ELECTRICITY AND 

John Quincy Adams in his old age, "Pity we can't get 
a new hull for his engine." We have got to come 
right down to Dr. Chalmer's theory of the new heavens 
and the new earth or give up any idea of immortality. 
With this kind of material spiritualism there is no mys- 
tery about birth into another world. 

Upon witnessing in a tenement house the death of 
an infant, born of vice, weariness and despair, we in- 
quire by what quantity of spiritual force, hope, ex- 
pectancy or moral virility that child shall have a suc- 
cessful spiritual birth. It may be that in nature there 
is an infinitesmally minute germ of resurrection and an 
ancestral force. The love of the mother and the sym- 
pathy of the friends follow the little one in those 
strong ties of human commiseration and they may 
nourish it beyond the line of the grave. But if not, 
what matter if it sleep? We know that on earth human 
loves become seemingly annihilated. But the old pic- 
tures of angel hands that come to bear the little one 
away are not without some basis in rational spirituality. 
Sympathy will reach farther than the long-distance 
telephone on earth. 

And there is a foretaste of eternity here in that hour 
of delightful exaltation when we return home from a 
long voyage or absence. How we are drawn around 
the earth toward one spot, one little hamlet, one little 
cottage, one little chair, or crib, or cradle to one little 
form and soul that is a magnet greater than all the 
world beside. 



THE RESURRECTION. 2$l 



INNATE IMMORTALITY. 

Against the theory here set forth of the innate power 
of the soul for self-resurrection, and for continuing 
moral evolution even unto salvation and immortality, 
criticism of some Christians will arise. That criticism 
must be met, reverently but with philosophic consist- 
ency and from the Unitarian point of view. There are 
Christians who believe that dying without accepting 
the dogmas of the Trinity and Vicarious Redemption 
will result in personal extinction, while others will ad- 
mit the continued existence of the infidel, but with his 
damnation. 

"We believe that men who reject Christ as the life- 
giver will be eternally excluded from life, be no more, 
be as though they had not been." — Rev. George Storrs. 

This declaration, with God substituted for Christ, 
would be consistent with an universal religion and with 
this theory of an innate soul-persistence. But the 
morality of Christianity, which is its essential, differ- 
entiates widely from its metaphysical dogmas. The 
soul has its own moral evolution like all things else, 
and there would be no suitable environment in the 
Beyond for continued wickedness. Persistent and ex- 
treme iniquity may end in personal dispersion, but that 
would be progressively and by psychological law, not 
by arbitration or miracle. But what effect here upon 
holiness can a mere irrational belief, or mechanical 



252 ELECTRICITY AND 

acquiescence, have in what cannot be comprehended? 
There are many degrees of apprehension under the 
word behef, all of which would amount to nothing 
without the practical moral system of Jesus. 

"Not every one that saith unto me, Lord, Lord shall 
enter the kingdom of heaven, but he that doeth the will 
of my Father which is in heaven." 

While the moral system of Jesus is most perfect, 
the observation of which will save sinners, the element 
of human gratitude in supposing His death to be a 
vicarious ransom is, perhaps, the most powerful factor 
in contrition, conversion and regeneration of the human 
soul. But there are other roads to God that are more 
universal and comprehensible, without doubt, mystery, 
contradictions, scholastic chaff or perpetual and weari- 
some straining for effect. There are no mystery and 
supernaturalness in the Sermon on the Mount, the 
Lord's Prayer, or the Golden Rule, that have made 
the Christian nations what they are above the rest of 
the world, but in which there is no hint of sacrifice or 
trinity. Have not Hebrews, Mahometans, Uni- 
tarians, even Pagans, gone to heaven, been the sweetest 
of companions and the best of citizens? Who dares 
say nay ? Is such a cruel death as that of Jesus a part 
of the divine love or character, or was the crucifixion 
simply a murderous impulse, or incident of an unde- 
veloped race? Modern Jews have abandoned brute 
sacrifice. Jesus did not take away the sins of the 



THE RESURRECTION. 



253 



world, for there has been a good deal of sin since ; but 
His example will take it away if it be followed. 

If bloody reparation is required by God's law for my 
sins, why may not I suffer it as well as a proxy suffer it 
for me ? That would be justice. We see that in human 
law and society easy absolution increases crime. As a 
lover of moral system and law I do not desire pardon, 
but prefer to suffer the penalty. There is no law with- 
out penalty and no penalty without infliction. Human 
law has no vicariousness ; no compassionate father 
would inflict such discipline in his family. I make 
public confession and penance that in an explosive in- 
stant of youth I was disrespectful to my mother. It 
did not change her radiant smile ; but nothing can re- 
move my stain and crushing remorse but penitence at 
her feet in eternity until she lifts me again to her 
breast as her first born. In the relinquishment of the 
Trinity and Redemption there need not be abated one 
jot or tittle of the law or of love for Jesus the great 
Teacher, Leader, Captain. 

"Master, which is the great commandment in the law? 
And he said unto them, Thou shalt love the Lord thy 
God with all thy heart and with all thy soul and with all 
thy mind. Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself. On 
these two commandments hang the whole law and the 
prophets." 

This does not require tomes of learned exposition nor 
metaphysical and rancorous discussion. Taking this 
Christian doctrine right from the lips of Jesus it con- 



254 ELECTRICITY AND 

stitutes a divine fountain-head that will wash away the 
errors of early and late bloodthirstiness for His butch- 
ery, ferocious and agonizing. What was wrong in 
the Jews could not have been right in God. The cruci- 
fixion was against every principle of gentleness and 
compassion that we have ever been taught about God's 
kingdom, as well as man's, and is an entire stultification 
of the logical faculties that are given to us. 

FLESH AND BLOOD. 

If Jesus' body had come as miraculously as it went 
there might have been claimed of it a divinity; but 
there being no possible secrecy in a birth, as there is 
concealed a dogma within the secrecy of a conception, 
He had to be accorded a human origin, through His 
mother, with all its hereditary sins ; and therefore "in 
that He Himself hath suffered, being tempted, He is 
able to succor them that are tempted." It is not too 
plain, nor too soon, to say that these two dead limbs 
of Christianity — Incarnation and Redemption — galva- 
nized by tradition and childhood's susceptibility, in- 
graining and growing with human life, will be lopped 
off in time, leaving Christianity intellectually clear and 
pure. When we ask, What has Hebraism done for the 
Jews? What has Brahminism done for the Indians? 
What has Unitarianism done for the citizen? even 
What has Idolatry done for the Pagans? we answer, 



THE RESURRECTION. 255 

What Christianity has done for the nations, but 
through its morals, not its miracles. 



*7esus was the most perfect man that ever lived." — Dr. 
R. R. Meredith. 



Then He was not God. An animal body cannot 
personalize a God, even an angel ; their economy is nat- 
urally incongruous. In all spiritual and divine contem- 
plation the animal body is too repugnant to find a place 
for divinity. The idea is grotesque, loathsome, sacri- 
legious. ^'Flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom 
of heaven." The animal body is earthy and temporal ; 
divinity is heavenly and eternal. Although the phys- 
iology is the chosen way of the Almighty for starting 
a spirit here to go on of its own internal tenacity and 
aspiration, beyond bodily existence, as the moth goes 
on beyond the grub, there is no synchronism between 
the body and the soul, and only a very temporary and 
limited sympathy and reliance between them. Never 
can the decaying, shameful, changing, repulsive car- 
cass be harmonious with the highest human ideas of 
spiritual and moral refinement or of personal dignity 
and exaltation, much less divinity or angelic. Even 
in the modesty of savages the body is hidden. It is a 
nest and germinator of appetites, of greed, covetous- 
ness, fears, revenges, reprisals, disease, decay, ofifens- 
iveness and death. The soul is eternal, beautiful. The 
general teachings of Jesus, all second-hand, as He never 



l^ 



256 ELECTRICITY AND 

wrote a word, do not imply either vicarious reparation 
or His own divinity. 

"I can of mine own self do nothing; as I hear I judge 
and my judgment is just, because I seek not mine own 
will but of the Father which sent me. For I have not 
spoken of myself; but the Father which sent me. He 
gave me a commandment what I should say." 

And His human despair and doubt He announced, in 
His last agonies, in the words: *'My God, my God, 
why hast Thou forsaken me?" 

We hail the power of His name and crown Him 
Lord of all, and we keep His commandments without 
wandering in the metaphysical misunderstandings and 
misinterpretations that followed His blessed ministry. 
This would be true catholicity and a universal religion 
that ALL could accept. And this kind of Christianity 
does not contravene the soul's evident evolution or the 
soul as a concrete item of continued existence in the 
Universe. This is the lifting up of Jesus that will draw 
ALL men unto Him. In such a Christianity there will 
be neither persecution nor martyrdom. 

Mr. Drummond has remarked : ''The spiritual man 
is no new development of nature, he is a new creation 
from above.'' We may answer that spiritual minded- 
ness may be a new creation from above, but the man 
is not new. He is the same old man changed, as a \ 
sick man becomes a well man. His soul's modes of mo- \ 



THE RESURRECTION. 



^S7 



tion have changed. The identity of memory is left, and 
all the identity of faculty and mental law are there the 
same as before. Mr. Drummond also uses the analogy 
of biogenesis as an argument for redemption; that is, 
because (as he assumes) animal life can come only 
from preexisting animal life of the same kind, there- 
fore a spiritual life can come only from a preexisting 
spiritual life of Jesus. That could not be unless spirit- 
ual life is foreign to human nature. But the soul 
commences with bodily conception, made in the image 
of God, and holiness is naturally developed in the 
human soul. Even admitting a soul may die on earth 
and be renewed with holiness by God, that can be done 
directly from God without a personal Mediator, direct 
from the spirit of God. The doctrine of Mr. Drum- 
mond makes a man an ape, sure enough. It is not 
better than common materialism. What hope has Mr. 
Drummond for the uncounted millions who never heard 
of Jesus? An eminent theologian said, 'Tf this church 
were the world all the Christians could be contained in 
one pew." What about God's children in other pews ? 
Is there no altruism out of the church? If they are 
saved without belief, but by moral philosophy, then 
may we be. Christianity as generally understood has 
of all religions produced the best results; kept our 
families together, has brought up our children, but 

*To do justice and judgment is more acceptable to the 
Lord than sacrifice." 



258 ELECTRICITY AND 

The Almighty's methods are by evolution or else the 
necessity for propitiation of sin would have been fore- 
stalled by prevention. But if there must be vicarious 
atonement it would be by a system universal and com- 
prehensible, not mysterious and limited in time, transit 
and tongue, invented by an age that knew not the earth 
was round and continued through superstition that yet 
shades every finite mind. 

INDIVIDUALITY. 

In support of this theory of soul-substance it is not 
necessary to meet every remote question that may 
arise in metaphysical maundering. When we say that 
the soul is a circumscribed mass of ethereal substance 
we are not bound to define how much substance, 
whether it is just the size of an atom or how many 
angels can dance on the point of a needle. The brain \ 
or sensorium of the red ant is as small as the point of 
a needle, and yet it contains the architectural and civic 
genius of a wren. Nor when we say that the soul dis- 
perses and loses its bodily identity are we bound to say 
whither its substance has gone and what portions of 
the mind have accompanied what portions of the sub- 
stance in its apportionment among other souls? We 
will assume the analogy of bodily life. We know we 
have here only a quasi-individuality, physically and 
mentally ; we know that the body and mind are always 
changing while continuing the chain of ego memories 



THE RESURRECTION, 259 

and causations that make up a quasi individuality. We 
share the feehngs and secrets of others, and they do 
ours, of the past as well as of the present. So in the 
next world we shall have the same kind of quasi indi- 
viduality that may be dispersed, even to extinction, or 
conserved in God, as a wave has an individuality and 
yet is a part of the sea. Individuality there as well 
as it is here is a condition of virility. Or, in other 
words, life there is a matter of will, persistence and 
health, as it is here. If we do not get too far away 
from the analogy of this life we shall not plunge into 
the vexation of mystery. If sin will dissipate the soul, 
as it ought, of course the Power that breathed into 
man the ''breath of life,'' the breath of His life, in the 
first instance, could do it again. The power that can 
create can re-create, if it becomes necessary. He can 
reassemble the portions of the soul body by magnetic 
and telepathic law — if it becomes necessary. But such 
far-reaching questions are not to the purpose of this 
thesis. The immediate question is, 'Tf a man die shall 
he live again?" Let eternal life take care of itself. 
Moral renovation or galvanization is not re-creation. 
It can, like an antiseptic, arrest decomposition and re- 
store health, but it does not make a new soul-body. 
Now this soul entity, if it have wholesomeness to arrive 
at all in the next world, will there have less hindrance 
to its evolutionary power, for there it shall have no 
impediments of the flesh from which all sin springs, 
but will have only purely mental conditions. ; All 



26o ELECTRICITY AND 

chrysalids do not come out of their cocoons ; some fail 
for lack of vitality within or from assaults from with- 
out. The soul may not he projected into the next world 
at all, or it may survive for a short and feeble existence. 
The chances are that it will be born into favorable 
environments and life, if it be born into spiritual life 
at all. Its best chance is on this side of the grave, and 
here its regime is not a hard one. 

As to our individuality we are like the meteors — 
from everlasting to everlasting, the memories of the 
great past now being obscessed by phenomena while 
passing through this world, the attrition of which 
illuminates for an instant ourselves and the things 
about us. Some individualities are consumed, being 
vaporized into the ether, direct, and some f all as stones , 
having lost their divine or inherent impetus, to be 
finally dissipated with all matter. The soul also comes 
from the unlimited realms of God's substance at 
parental coition and goes back to God's realms as a 
soul if it have sufficient impetus. That is why in our 
finer intuitions we reach backward, sideward and for- 
ward into knowledge not gained by our limited planet- 
ary experience. Or, again, the soul is like a ripple of 
the ocean of soul, connected with it all but preserving 
a qualified individuality as long as the outward impell- 
ing force or inward impetus lasts. When thought and 
will-power are in the wave it is an eternal thing. Each 
human individual is only a thought or memory of God, 
like a detached memory in our own experience which 



\ 



THE RESURRECTION, 261 

cannot be brought into the continuous and connected 
mass of our ego history. Mental and moral develop- 
ment ensure progress, tenacity and immortality. Hu- 
man souls are so» made of the cosmic-etheric-God- 
substance that they all commingle with one another, 
and with God, by affinities like gases or liquids. To 
refined and intuitive minds there can be no secrets, no 
exclusive knowledge, joy or suffering. Sympathy is 
the osmosis of society. Wireless telegraphy is a 
physical archetype of what has been existing all the 
time in the spiritual realms. This ocean of ether is 
the grand domain of future discovery, of which elec- 
tricity is the open door. In it is our immortality. 



262 ELECTRICITY AND 



CHAPTER XL 



'"there is a spiritual body/' — PAUL. 



The Resurrection — The Spiritual X Ray — Etheric Sym- 
pathy — Prayer — Etheric Manna — Funerals — Hope. 

Resurrection means only the resurrection of the 
spiritual body. The physical body could not be resur- 
rected because it is an indefinable thing; it has no 
enduring character ; it is always shifting ; it is never at 
one instant what it is at another. There is no siicli 
/ thing as ''the'' body as a fixed quantity. It is like the 
* stream of a river. A resurrection of ''the'' body would 
require an epochal principle — a fixed time in its devel- 
opment. When should that be ? At the emaciation of 
old age, at the time of death? Or at what period of 
life, health and strength? Physiology would not be 
adapted to ethereal realms. It would have too much 
specific gravity and it would be unnatural in every way. 
The body with the rest of physical matter is finally to 
\-^ , ^ dissipate. Nothing known to man is so indefinite and 
unfixed for even an instant of time as the physical 
body. But the spiritual body is a fixed quantity of un- 
changeable matter. 

Our confidence in a future state should not rest 



1 -, 



THE RESURRECTION, 263 

alone upon what we can persuade our faith into, but 
rather upon what we can know. Were we satisfied 
that Hfe once begun may never end; that the decHne 
or death of another person means only our own blind- 
ness ; that the so-called dead do not leave us, but remain 
about us ; and were w^e informed of the nature of 
psychic substance, of its enduring quality, and that in all 
the physiological changes the final one of bodily death' 
is only a trivial incident in soul history, a mere coat- 
shedding, then we would live here more rationally and 
happily. We would worship mammon less and main- 
tain that moral culture and hope that make an enjoy- 
ment of mere existence and assure us of a reawakening. 
The aged shed no tears at parting, or at the death-bed, 
for they are lifted above that, and they feel by instinct 
as well as by religion that they will be in sure com- 
munication spiritually. 

There has nothing yet been found in secular phil- 
osophy, or hardly in the faith of theology, that so sat- 
isfies the heart's aflfections like the recognizing of this 
universal ether as a medium of constant and certain 
communication between kindred souls, however dis- 
tant. As we partake in part of the divine form and 
essence so we partake in degree of the divine omni- 
presence. Souls that are in tune with each other — 
keyed alike — exchange and weave their influences 
when bodily separated. A stroke upon the ocean is 
felt in all its different bays. So in the infinitude of 
the soul's susceptibilities it may feel from anywhere 



264 ELECTRICITY AND 

\ the actions of its kin that are throbbing upon this ocean 
of ether. This truth has come to us in family separa- 
tions with a practical satisfaction. We feel satisfactorily 
the presence of parents or of children after they have 
left us ; and that former agony of animai grief at sep- 
aration is mollified or removed entirely. This seems 
not to be the imagination, or a growing dullness, but a 
* clear and strongminded realization of a substantial 
fact. In the absence of loved ones, we feel streams of 
real sustenance and sympathy coming back to us that 
are not a fancy but a practical comfort. As steam, 
telegraphy and telephony have mollified the hr art- 
breaking anguish of old-time separations, so there is 
no way to reconcile us with this world's final separa- 
tions but through the development of scientific spirit- 
ualism. That will substitute a real and permanent 
consolation for all mankind. We can never walk 
through life with the erect and intelligent bearing of 
really exalted beings until we shall know that we are 
safe and that our departed loved ones are yet near us 
and will be seen when the fleshly cataract shall drop 
from our eyes. 

There could be no conceivable conditions that could 
make it desirable and satisfactory to live here always, 
except to young and animal people. Under its very 
best the body is, to delicate natures, a weakness, a 
shame and a disgust. The soul, in its modesty, is al- 
ways trying to rise above it ; between the two there is 



THE RESURRECTION. 265 

• 

perpetual war. What satisfaction to the pure there 
would be in a life without earthy trammels ! Wealth 
and station do not bring content and happiness. The 
most approved scholarship, the best fortune and the 
happiest of domestic life all suffer, inevitably, the 
visitations of sickness, death, loneliness, disappoint- 
ment, soul-craving, unrestful longing and looking for- 
ward, a want unsatisfied and unexplained, and, even 
though we are fortunate, we have a painful compas- 
sion for the suffering always around us. Nuptial vows 
are broken, family altars are cast down, strangers carry 
away our loved ones, families separate, parents and 
children in courts of law swear away each other's 
characters, homesteads are torn down and finally grave- 
yards are sold and scooped out. All is fleeting. But 
may not those loves be reunited in the new materialism ? 
Beyond the blindness and passions of earth estranged 
loves may revive. 

Even the pure charms of inanimate nature weary 
because they give back no substance. We may go 
around the earth and return home unsatisfied, longing 
and yearning. But if in that home, however little and 
plain, there be love and religion — those two golden 
links between here and eternity — our life is an unend- 
ing fountain of joy; the cup of our blessings is always 
full ; it is true wealth, because those elements are feed- 
ing streams of soul-substance from others, living foun- 
tains, forever replenishing our waste. But if there be 
not love of God and kindred in that home it is a mere 



2(^(> ELECTRICITY AND 

dog kennel or mad house. Mutuality is a support; 
solitude is decay. The happiest hours of a king in his 
realms of material splendor are when he is alone with 
his queen. 

It is well to believe that there is somebody or some- 
thing abiding and true, for nothing within this world 
is. We want a God and His eternal laws and rewards ; 
we want happiness and peace that will stay; we want 
a sure thing; we want a life without forebodings or 
separations. Every heart shrieks out with very an- 
guish for permanence. 

Believing in the material substance of the soul we 
can see and feel a tangible life in the skies. The soul 
when it escapes may stay right here or may traverse 
the diffused ether which, having composed the very 
rocks and metals, is more real and abiding than the 
earth itself and has more objects there to entertain 
and engage the spiritual faculties. It may not speak 
to our physical ears nor show itself to our physical 
eyes, but its laws of magnetic contact and its ''still 
small voice'' upon our impulses remain, though we 
may too often be preoccupied or too animal to heed 
them. As gently and silently as comes the rose-tinted 
dawn, our departed friends suffuse us with our first 
thoughts and thus they guide us. If the soul is elec- 
tric it has the speed of electricity, and a thought by 
us may summon to our side in an instant, a friend soul 
which is a million of miles distant. If we would have 
our angels minister unto us we should so live in 



THE RESURRECTION, 267 

thought and act that they may. We can accustom our- 
selves to reaUze scientifically that there is a real distant 
land of abiding ambitions, desires, gratifications and 
social loves. Without this belief we become selfish, 
tricky, ignoble, animal, and society defeats its own end. 
The truest lady and gentleman are they who have 
spiritualistic habits of mind ; and nothing in the canons 
of moral law or of social formalities will give a human 
being more control over his appetites and manners, or 
better prolong health and life to and even beyond their 
constitutional limit, than the consciousness of an inde- 
pendent, superior and detached soul body within the 
animal body that reigns like prince or princess. 

''The greatest burden and calamity of the sou] is the 
body from which she cannot disengage herself, but by 
such a wise use of reason as will wean and separate her 
from all corporeal passions." — Plato. 

«> 

This generation, ennuied with materialism is en- 
quiring, *Ts life worth living?" Surely not in itself. 
It is only worth living as a preparation for a grander 
life. 

The recognition of the surrounding God is the old- 
fashioned grace. Without it there can be no sure 
finishing touch to human character. The Godless wise 
and the Godless good may think, in the flush of health, 
education, fashion, social standing and prosperity, that 
they are very proper and nice ; they may think that they 
have the highest degree of family love, personal honor 



268 ELECTRICITY AND 

and civilized development; but they are, at the best, 
only superior heathen, for their feet are upon the 
sands. However educated and lovely a woman is she 
is only a refined barbarian and not safe for man's con- 
fidence until clarified by the religion of believing in 
God's actual presence. Then she becomes pellucid, 
angelic. And no man is fit to have in his control and 
protection her delicate mind and body until his savage 
nature is toned down by a careful and fixed moral 
philosophy. 

Consistently carrying out the theory of direct per- 
sonal and material contact with the surrounding God 
brings us to the naturalness and true science of prayer, 
of communication with God, of face-to-face confidence 
and its necessary holiness and innocence. With such 
an adviser our intuitions will lead us right to success, 
without any stunning or miraculous special providence. 

PRAYER IS SPIRITUAL BREATHING. 

The presence of a friend requires intercourse. God's 
presence makes prayer as natural as is the breathing 
of fresh air. It is the natural, scientific, face-to-face 
recognition of the pervasive materiality of God. It is 
t he ass imilation of God to and in our natures. It will 
keep the mind serene and sustained in the most harass- 
ing and destructive environments. Whenever one has 
nothing else to do one should go and pray, for prayer 
is the lungs of the soul. In a military prison with 



7s 






THE RESURRECTION. 269 

hunger, cold, filth, disease, wasting body and mind; 
locked helplessly in an asylum surrounded by the per- 
ishing insane; in a civil prison, consorting with the 
vile and abandoned ; in business trouble or poverty, the 
constant invocationof and coalescing with this Power 
that is all about us will keep the temper sweet, the 
intellect balanced, the hope alive and the will strong; 
it will keep the body healthy until the hour of de- 
liverance. 

"I am continually witnessing the most remarkable in- 
stances of answers to prayers. My life is made up of 
them." — Spurgeon. 

Those teachers should supplement that moral phil- 
osophy by this kind of material philosophy. Then 
men will believe in it. Proceeding upon the analogies 
of science we say that nothing will sustain the weary, 
sick, perishing soul like this inexhaustible sea of spirit 
essence about us, an essence wliich is none other than 
the Holy Ghost, literally flooding the universe with 
i ts sunshine. Humanity has no cure. All the plants 
in the world cannot keep alive an unthrifty plant; it 
needs the universal air and sunshine. Even human 
loves and all mortal felicities fail us in the ultimate 
test. But nobody ever missed restoration and refresh- 
ment at this psychic fountain. When this is vouch- 
safed death is illumined and our path hence to eternity 
is clear and happy. Even a despairing man, sad, lonely 



270 ELECTRICITY AND 

and a failure in business, within the blank walls of his 
cheap room, can, if he will fully surrender , obtain a 
sunburst of cheer from this ethereal source that will 
not only clarify his brain, but will radiate from his 
face, make him magnetic, infect miraculously all about 
him and get him a job. 

When one feels mean and weak, he can draw nobility 
from the skies. One look at the blue ether is worth as 
much as wine; it is magical in banishing any rising 
sensuality. Go out often and look up to it; drink it 
in and feast upon it; it nourishes soul and body di- 
rectly. Old men feeling the decline of physical forces 
resort to wine; that is the beginning of the end — the 
last fuel for bodily fires. When men begin to feel 
this soul vacuity let them go out under the sky and 
connect with the never failing sea of soul svibstance^ 
and invoke it. It is the one elixir of life; the very 
fountain of perpetual youth; daily soul manna. This 
is morals and physics united. We have seen in the 
home that the most nourishing and grateful food for 
the old folk is love and sympathy. If they have not 
that of friends they turn to God. Wi'^hout prayer 
to this concrete presence, or at least constant unspoken 
sympathy with it, man is no more than an intelligent 
brute and cannot break from confinement into liberty. 
To devoted friends we are not mute. God is around 
f us and near us or nowhere. 

"He restoreth my soul." — David. 



THE RESURRECTION. 27I 

"Buy wine and milk without money and without 
price." — Isaiah. 



The only true stimulus is that of a free will. As we 
direct the physical energies of God to do our work, 
as wind and wave, steam and electricity, chemistry and 
sunshine, so we may direct the spiritual energy of God \ ; 
in upon our own souls to animate and cheer, without K 
stomach stimulus that only sears and torments, leaving, 
by relapse, a still lower state. 

"Prayer impotent? If I dared to think that there was 
no force in prayer methinks God, after all he has done 
for me and mine, would strike me dead. Prayer impo- 
tent? Why, it is the mightiest force in the universe. 
Lightning has no speed, the Alpine avalanch no power 
that can compare with it." — T. DeWitt Talmage. 

Physical pleasures cloy, exhaust, and, if lived for 
themselves, finally destroy. But the last of a true 
spiritualist is a success. The surest road to even 
earthly happiness is the disenthralment of physical 
hampers. No pleasures that come of mortality are 
abiding. After we have exhausted the world, then 
what ? Are we left with a sickening blank ? God and 
his ethereal universe are inexhaustible subjects that 
satisfy the soul, that leave no place for ennui. 

"As the body is sustained by absorbing nutrition from 
matter, so the soul is sustained by assimilating the spir- 
itual substance of the Invisible Kingdom. The most 



272 ELECTRICITY AND 

ethereal elements must combine to nourish that consum- 
mate plant whose blossom is man's mind 

The disembodied soul, as conceived by the Greeks and 
after them by the Romans, is material, but of so thin a 
substance that it cannot be felt with the hands. It is 
exhaled with the dying breath or issues through a war- 
rior's wounds." — W. R. Alger. 



A man's breath will soon exhaust the fresh air in 
his room ; he needs the great blue dome of heaven for 
his supply. So, left to his own resources, he soon 
exhausts his finite moral nature. He needs the illimit- 
able spaces to nourish his soul. The blue ether is, 
chemically and actually, the parent of the physical and 
moral universe. Mankind by the habit of looking up 
to it, craving it, invoking it, absorbing it, zvill derive 
substantial, physical, mental and moral aid from it. 

The following is a wonderfully important statement 
both from the respectability of the source and because 
of its explicitness : 

"The Right Reverend W. Taylor addressing a congre- 
gation at the Simpson M. E. Church in the City of 
Brooklyn at the Simpson Memorial in 1884, said that 
he had attended a conference twenty-six years ago at 
Pittsburg, having visited the bishop who was alarmingly 
ill, and that the bishop had requested him to have the 
brethren pray for him. He went to the conference and 
told the brethren of the desire of the dying brother, and 
they all knelt down straightway together before the 
Lord. They had not been on their knees for more than 
ten minutes when through everyone of them went a 
divine shock, which touched every heart and thrilled 



J. 



UKwvU^ WuW i?<Mf- '^'' ^ 



THE RESURRECTION. 



tion have changed. The identity of memory is left, and 
all the identity of faculty and mental law are there the 
same as before. Mr. Drummond also uses the analogy 
of biogenesis as an argument for redemption; that is, 
because (as he assumes) animal life can come only 
from preexisting animal life of the same kind, there- 
fore a spiritual life can come only from a preexisting 
spiritual life of Jesus. That could not be unless spirit- 
ual life is foreign to human nature. But the soul 
commences with bodily conception, made in the image 
of God, and holiness is naturally developed in the 
human soul. Even admitting a soul may die on earth 
and be renewed with holiness by God, that can be done 
directly from God without a personal Mediator, direct 
from the spirit of God. The doctrine of Mr. Drum- 
mond makes a man an ape, sure enough. It is not 
better than common materialism. What hope has Mr. 
Drummond for the uncounted millions who never heard 
of Jesus? An eminent theologian said, 'Tf this church 
were the world all the Christians could be contained in 
one pew." What about God's children in other pews ? 
Is there no altruism out of the church? If they are 
saved without belief, but by moral philosophy, then 
may we be. Christianity as generally understood has 
of all religions produced the best results; kept our 
families together, has brought up our children, but 

'To do justice and judgment is more acceptable to the 
Lord than sacrifice." 




XjpijJ- ^-^ 




^ Ji-. - -, 9^.. 



258 ELECTRICITY AND 

The Almighty's methods are by evolution or else the 
nece3sity for propitiation of sin would have been fore- 
stalled by prevention. But if there must be vicarious 
atonement it would be by a system universal and com- 
prehensible, not mysterious and limited in time, transit 
and tongue, invented by an age that knew not the earth 
was round and continued through superstition that yet 
shades every finite mind. 

INDIVIDUALITY. 

In support of this theory of soul-substance it is not 
necessary to meet every remote question that may 
arise in metaphysical maundering. When we say that 
the soul is a circumscribed mass of ethereal substance 
we are not bound to define how much substance, 
whether it is just the size of an atom or how many 
angels can dance on the point of a needle. The brain 
or sensorium of the red ant is as small as the point of 
a needle, and yet it contains the architectural and civic 
genius of a wren. Nor when we say that the soul dis- 
perses and loses its bodily identity are we hound to say 
whither its substance has gone and what portions of 
the mind have accompanied what portions of the sub- 
stance in its apportionment among other souls? We 
will assume the analogy of bodily life. We know we 
have here only a quasi-individuality, physically and 
mentally ; we know that the body and mind are always 
changing while continuing the chain of ego memories 



THE RESURRECTION. 259 

and causations that make up a quasi individuality. We 
share the feeUngs and secrets of others, and they do 
ours, of the past as well as of the present. So in the 
next world we shall have the same kind of quasi indi- 
viduality that may be dispersed, even to extinction, or 
conserved in God, as a w^ave has an individuality and 
yet is a part of the sea. Individuality there as well 
as it is here is a condition of virility. Or, in other 
words, life there is a matter of will, persistence and 
health, as it is here. If we do not get too far away 
from the analogy of this life we shall not plunge into 
the vexation of mystery. If sin will dissipate the soul, 
as it ought, of course the Power that breathed into 
man the ''breath of life," the breath of His life, in the 
first instance, could do it again. The power that can 
create can re-create, if it becomes necessary. He can 
reassemble the portions of the soul body by magnetic 
and telepathic law — if it becomes necessary. But such 
far-reaching questions are not to the purpose of this 
thesis. The immediate question is, 'Tf a man die shall 
he live again?" Let eternal life take care of itself. 
Moral renovation or galvanization is not re-creation. 
It can, like an antiseptic, arrest decomposition and re- 
store health, but it does not make a new soul-body. 
Now this soul entity, if it have wholesomeness to arrive 
at all in the next world, will there have less hindrance 
to its evolutionary power, for there it shall have no 
impediments of the flesh from which all sin springs, 
but will have only purely mental conditions. All 



26o ELECTRICITY AND 

Vhrysalids do not come out of their cocoons ; some fail 
iXf lack of vitality within or from assaults from with- 
oiit. The soul may not be projected into the next world 
at ail, or it may survive for a short and feeble existence. 
The chances are that it will be born into favorable 
environments and life, if it be born into spiritual life 
at all. Its best chance is on this side of the grave, and 
here its regime is not a hard one. 

As to our individuality we are like the meteors — 
from everlasting to everlasting, the memories of the 
great past now being obscessed by phenomena while 
passing through this world, the attrition of which 
illuminates for an instant ourselves and the things 
about us. Some individualities are consumed, being 
vaporized into the ether, direct, and some fall as stones, 
having lost their divine or inherent impetus, to be 
finally dissipated with all matter. The soul also comes 
from the unlimited realms of God's substance at 
parental coition and goes back to God's realms as a 
soul if it have sufficient impetus. That is why in our 
finer intuitions we reach backward, sideward and for- 
ward into knowledge not gained by our limited planet- 
ary experience. Or, again, the soul is like a ripple of 
the ocean of soul, connected with it all but preserving 
a qualified individuality as long as the outward impell- 
ing force or inward impetus lasts. When thought and 
will-power are in the wave it is an eternal thing. Each 
human individual is only a thought or memory of God, 
like a detached memory in our own experience which 



THE RESURRECTION, 261 

cannot be brought into the continuous and connected 
mass of our ego history. Mental and moral develop- 
ment ensure progress, tenacity and immortality. Hu- 
man souls are so« made of the cosmic-etheric-God- 
substance that they all commingle with one another, 
and with God, by affinities like gases or liquids. To 
refined and intuitive minds there can be no secrets, no 
exclusive knowledge, joy or suffering. Sympathy is 
the osmosis of society. Wireless telegraphy is a 
physical archetype of what has been existing all the 
time in the spiritual realms. This ocean of ether is 
the grand domain of future discovery, of which elec- 
tricity is the open door. In it is our immortality. 



262 ELECTRICITY AND 



CHAPTER XI, 



''^THERE IS A SPIRITUAL BODY/' — PAUL. 



The Resurrection— The Spiritual X Ray—Etheric Sym- 
pathy — Prayer — Etheric Manna — Funerals — Hope. 

Resurrection means only the resurrection of the 
spiritual body. The physical body could not be resur- 
rected because it is an indefinable thing; it has no 
enduring character ; it is always shifting ; it is never at 
one instant what it is at another. There is no such 
thing as ''the" body as a fixed quantity. It is like the 
stream of a river. A resurrection of ''the'' body would 
require an epochal principle — a fixed time in its devel- 
opment. When should that be ? At the emaciation of 
old age, at the time of death? Or at what period of 
life, health and strength? Physiology would not be 
adapted to ethereal realms. It would have too much 
specific gravity and it would be unnatural in every way. 
The body with the rest of physical matter is finally to 
dissipate. Nothing known to man is so indefinite and 
unfixed for even an instant of time as the physical 
body. But the spiritual body is a fixed quantity of un- 
changeable matter. 

Our confidence in a future state should not rest 



^v^Jj^AkJuX^ 



THE RESURRECTION. 263 

alone upon what we can persuade our faith into, but 
rather upon what we can know. Were we satisfied 
that hfe once begun may never end; that the decHne 
or death of another person means only our own blind- 
ness ; \hat the so-called dead do not leave us, but remain 
about ii.s; an-d were we informed of the nature of 
psychic substance, of its enduring quality, and that in all 
the physiological changes the final one of bodily death 
is only a trivial incident in soul history, a mere coat- 
shedding, then we would live here more rationally and 
happily. We would worship mammon less and main- 
tain that moral culture and hope that make an enjoy- 
ment of mere existence and assure us of a reawakening. 
The aged shed no tears at parting, or at the death-bed, 
for they are lifted above that, and they feel by instinct 
as well as by religion that they will be in sure com- 
munication spirituallyX, 

There has nothing yet been found in secular phil- 
osophy, or hardly in the faith of theology, that so sat- 
isfies the heart's affections like the recognizing of this 
universal ether as a medium of constant and certain 
communication between kindred souls, however dis- 
tant. As we partake in part of the divine form and 
essence so we partake in degree of the divine omni- 
presence. Souls that are in tune with each other — 
keyed alike — exchange and weave their influences 
when bodily separated. A stroke upon the ocean is 
felt in all its different bays. So in the infinitude of 
the soul's susceptibilities it may feel from anywhere 



264 ELECTRICITY AND 

the actions of its kin that are throbbing upon this ocean 
of ether. This truth has come to us in family separa- 
tions with a practical satisfaction. We feel satisfactorily 
the presence of parents or of children after they have 
left us ; and that former agony of animai grief at sep- 
aration is mollified or removed entirely. This seems 
not to be the imagination, or a growing dullness, but a 
clear and strongminded realization of a substantial 
fact. In the absence of loved ones, we feel streams of 
real sustenance and sympathy coming back to us that 
are not a fancy but a practical comfort. As steam, 
telegraphy and telephony have mollified the hr art- 
breaking anguish of old-time separations, so there is 
no way to reconcile us with this world's final separa- 
tions but through the development of scientific spirit- 
ualism. That will substitute a real and permanent 
consolation for all mankind. We can never walk 
through life with the erect and intelligent bearing'' of 
really exalted beings until we shall know that we are 
safe and that our departed loved ones are yet near us 
and will be seen when the fleshly cataract shall drop 
from our eyes. 

There could be no conceivable conditions that could 
make it desirable and satisfactory to live here always, 
except to young and animal people. Under its very 
best the body is, to delicate natures, a weakness, a 
shame and a disgust. The soul, in its modesty, is al- 
ways trying to rise above it ; between the two there is 



THE RESURRECTION, 265 

perpetual war. What satisfaction to the pure there 
would be in a life without earthy trammels ! Wealth 
and station do not bring content and happiness. The 
most approved scholarship, the best fortune and the 
happiest of domestic life all suffer, inevitably, the 
visitations of sickness, death, loneliness, disappoint- 
ment, soul-craving, unrestful longing and looking for- 
ward, a want unsatisfied and unexplained, and, even 
though we are fortunate, we have a painful compas- 
sion for the suffering always around us. Nuptial vows 
are broken, family altars are cast down, strangers carry 
away our loved ones, families separate, parents and 
children in courts of law swear away each other's 
characters, homesteads are torn down and finally grave- 
yards are sold and scooped out. All is fleeting. But 
may not those loves be reunited in the new materialism ? 
Beyond the blindness and passions of earth estranged 
loves may revive. 

Even the pure charms of inanimate nature weary 
because they give back no substance. We may go 
around the earth and return home unsatisfied, longing 
and yearning. But if in that home, however little and 
plain, there be love and religion — those two golden 
links between here and eternity — our life is an unend- 
ing fountain of joy; the cup of our blessings is always 
full ; it is true wealth, because those elements are feed- 
ing streams of soul-substance from others, living foun- 
tains, forever replenishing our waste. But if there be 
not love of God and kindred in that home it is a mere 



266 ELECTRICITY AND 

dog kennel or mad house. Mutuality is a support; 
solitude is decay. The happiest hours of a king in his 
realms of material splendor are when he is alone with 
his queen. 

It is well to believe that there is somebody or some- 
thing abiding and true, for nothing within this world 
is. We v/ant a God and His eternal laws and rewards ; 
we want happiness and peace that will stay; we want 
a sure thing; we want a life without forebodings or 
separations. Every heart shrieks out with very an- 
guish for permanence. 

Believing in the material substance of the soul we 
can see and feel a tangible life in the skies. The soul 
when it escapes may stay right here or may traverse 
the diffused ether which, having composed the very 
rocks and metals, is more real and abiding than the 
earth itself and has more objects there to entertain 
and engage the spiritual faculties. It may not speak 
to our physical ears nor show itself to our physical 
eyes, but its laws of magnetic contact and its ''still 
small voice" upon our impulses remain, though we 
may too often be preoccupied or too animal to heed 
them. As gently and silently as comes the rose-tinted 
dawn, our departed friends suffuse us with our first 
thoughts and thus they guide us. If the soul is elec- 
tric it has the speed of electricity, and a thought by 
us may summon to our side in an instant, a friend soul 
which is a million of miles distant. If we would have 
our angels minister unto us we should so live in 



THE RESURRECTION, 267 

thought and act that they may. We can accustom our- 
selves to realize scientifically that there is a real distant 
land of abiding ambitions, desires, gratifications and 
social loves. Without this belief we become selfish, 
tricky, ignoble, animal, and society defeats its own end. 
The truest lady and gentleman are they who have 
spiritualistic habits of mind ; and nothing in the canons 
of moral law or of social formalities will give a human 
being more control over his appetites and manners, or 
better prolong health and life to and even beyond their 
constitutional limit, than the consciousness of an inde- 
pendent, superior and detached soul body within the 
animal body that reigns like prince or princess. 

'The greatest burden and calamity of the sou] is the 
body from which she cannot disengage herself, but by 
such a wise use of reason as will wean and separate her 
from all corporeal passions.*' — Plato. 

This generation, ennuied with materialism is en- 
quiring, "Is life w^orth living?" Surely not in itself. 
It is only worth living as a preparation for a grander 
life. 

The recognition of the surrounding God is the old- 
fashioned grace. Without it there can be no sure 
finishing touch to human character. The Godless wise 
and the Godless good may think, in the flush of health, 
education, fashion, social standing and prosperity, that 
they are very proper and nice ; they may think that they 
have the highest degree of family love, personal honor 



268 ELECTRICITY AND 

and civilized development; but they are, at the best, 
only superior heathen, for their feet are upon the 
sands. However educated and lovely a woman is she 
is only a refined barbarian and not safe for man's con- 
fidence until clarified by the religion of believing in 
God's actual presence. Then she becomes pellucid, 
angelic. And no man is fit to have in his control and 
protection her delicate mind and body until his savage 
nature is toned-down by a careful and fixed moral 
philosophy. \ 

Consistently carrying out the theory of direct per- 
sonal and material contact with the surrounding God 
brings us to the naturalness and true science of prayer, 
of communication with God, bi face-to-face confidence 
and its necessary holiness and innocence. With such 
an adviser our intuitions will lead us right to success, 
without any stunning or miraculous special providence. 

PRAYER IS SPIRITUAL BREATHING. 

The presence of a friend requires intercourse. God's 
presence Hiakes prayer as natural as is the breathing 
of fresh air/^Jt is the natural, scientific, face-to-face 
recognition of the pervasive materiality of God. It is 
the assimilation of Gdd.^o and in our natures. It will 
keep the mind serene and sustained in the most harass- 
ing and destructive environments. Whenever one has 
nothing else to do one should go and pray, for prayer 
is the lungs of the soul. In a military prison with 



^^ ..^. . r^iVT' 



THE RESURRECTION. 269 

hunger, cold, filth, disease, wasting body and mind; 
locked helplessly in an asylum surrounded by the per- 
ishing insane; in a civil prison, consorting with the 
vile and abandoned ; in business trouble or poverty, the 
constant invocation of and coalescing with this Power 
that is all about us will keep the temper sweet, the 
intellect balanced, the hope alive and the will strong; 
it will keep the body healthy until the hour of de- 
liverance. 

\ 
"I am continually witnessing the most remarkable in- 
stances of answers to prayers. My life is made up of 
them." — Spurgeon. 

\ 

Those teachers should supplement that moral phil- 
osophy by this kind of material philosophy. Then 
men will believe in it. Proceeding upon the analogies 
of science we say that nothing will sustain the weary, 
sick, perishing soul like this inexhaustible sea of spirit 
essence about us, an essence which is none other than 
the Holy Ghost, literally flooding the universe with 
its sunshine. Humanity has no cure. All the plants 
in the world cannot keep alive an unthrifty plant; it 
needs the universal air and sunshine. Even human 
loves and all mortal felicities fail us in the ultimate 
test. But nobody ever missed restoration and refresh- 
ment at this psychic fountain. When this is vouch- 
safed death is illumined and our path hence to eternity 
is clear and happy. Even a despairing man, sad, lonely 



270 ELECTRICITY AND 

and a failure in business, within the blank walls of his 
cheap room, can, if he will fully surrender, obtain a 
sunburst of cheer from this ethereal source that will 
not only clarify his brain, but will radiate from his 
face, make him magnetic, infect miraculously all about 
him and get him a job. 

When one feels mean and weak, he can draw nobility 
from the skies. One look at the blue ether is worth as 
much as wine; it is magical in banishing any rising 
sensuality. Go out often and look up to it; drink it 
in and feast upon it; it nourishes soul and body di- 
rectly. Old men feeling the decline of physical forces 
resort to wine ; that is the beginning of the end — the 
last fuel for bodily fires. When men begin to feel 
this soul vacuity let them go out under the sky and 
connect with the never failing sea of soul substance, 
and invoke it. It is the one elixir of life ; the very 
fountain of perpetual youth ; daily soul manna. This 
is morals and physics united. We have seen in the 
home that the most nourishing and grateful food for 
the old folk is love and sympathy. If they have not 
that of friends they turn to God. Wi'^hout prayer 
to this concrete presence, or at least constant unspoken 
sympathy with it, man is no more than an intelligent 
brute and cannot break from confinement into liberty. 
To devoted friends we are not mute. God is around 
us and near us or nowhere. 

"He restoreth my soul." — David. 



THE RESURRECTION. 27 1 

''Buy wine and milk without money and without 
price." — Isaiah. 



The only true stimulus is that of a free will. As we 
direct the physical energies of God to do our work, 
as wind and wave, steam and electricity, chemistry and 
sunshine, so we may direct the spiritual energy of God 
in upon our own souls to animate and cheer, without 
stomach stimulus that only sears and torments, leaving, 
by relapse, a still lower state. 

'Trayer impotent? If I dared to think that there was 
no force in prayer methinks God, after all he has done 
for me and mine, would strike me dead. Prayer impo- 
tent? Why, it is the mightiest force in the universe. 
Lightning has no speed, the Alpine avalanch no power 
that can compare w^th it." — T. DeWitt Talmage. 

Physical pleasures cloy, exhaust, and, if lived for 
themselves, finally destroy. But the last of a true 
spiritualist is a success. The surest road to even 
earthly happiness is the disenthralment of physical 
hampers. No pleasures that come of mortality are 
abiding. After we have exhausted the world, then 
what ? Are we left with a sickening blank ? God and 
his ethereal universe are inexhaustible subjects that 
satisfy the soul, that leave no place for ennui. 

*'As the body is sustained by absorbing nutrition from 
matter, so the soul is sustained by assimilating the spir- 
itual substance of the Invisible Kingdom. The most 



272 ELECTRICITY AND 

ethereal elements must combine to nourish that consum- 
mate plant whose blossom is man's mind 

The disembodied soul, as conceived by the Greeks and 
after them by the Romans, is material, but of so thin a 
substance that it cannot be felt with the hands. It is 
exhaled with the dying breath or issues through a war- 
rior's wounds."— W. R. Alger. 
\ 

A man's breath will soon exhaust the fresh air in 
his room ; he needs the great blue dome of heaven for 
his supply. So, left to his own resources, he soon 
exhausts his finite moral nature. He needs the illimit- 
able spaces to nourish his soul. The blue ether is, 
chemically and actually, the parent of the physical and 
moral universe. Mankind by the habit of looking up 
to it, craving it, invoking it, absorbing it, zvill derive 
substantial, physical, mental and moral aid from it. 

The following is a wonderfully important statement 
both from the respectability of the sdurce and because 
of its explicitness : 

\ 

"The Right Reverend W. Taylor addressing a congre- 
gation at the Simpson M. E. Church in the City of 
Brooklyn at the Simpson Memorial in 1884, said that 
he had attended a conference twenty-six years ago at 
Pittsburg, having visited the bishop who was alarmingly 
ill, and that the bishop had requested him to have the 
brethren pray for him. He went to the conference and 
told the brethren of the desire of the dying brother, and 
they all knelt down straightway together before the 
Lord. They had not been on their knees for more thaa 
ten minutes when through everyone of them went a 
divine shock, which touched every heart and thrilled 



THE RESURRECTION. 



273 



every being, and there came all at once a conviction that 
their prayers had been heard. All joined in the glad 
exclamation, The Lord hath heard our prayer.' Dr. 
Bowman, now Bishop Bowman, made a note of the ex- 
act moment of the occurrence and we afterwards learned 
that it was at that very time — while we were yet on our 
knees praying for his recovery — that the sickness left 
him. The physician who was attending him, returned 
after a short absence and he exclaimed, 'Bishop, what 
has happened?' and the bishop replied that he felt bet- 
ter and that he knew that he was going to get well. 
The doctor raised his hands and said, 'A miracle, a 
miracle,' and so it was a miracle." 



Every agnostic with good sense and good heart, but 
who does not rely upon revelation has, after all, found 
himself but a poor stick to lean upon when he wants 
to reform. His self-resources do not furnish him with 
even his own standard of excellence and ambition, nor 
uphold that prescribed to him. Whatever his conceit 
and strength be, he desponds at last. But when he 
can realize scientifically that the Creative Intelligence 
is a substance all around and penetrating him as a 
physical fact, a real transubstantiation of the actual 
body and soul of God into his own, he feels that he 
has a supply that never runs short. 

FUNERALS. 

A reasoning spirituality like this, confirmed, will re- 
move that barbarism still lingering with society re- 



274 ELECTRICITY AND 

garding the dead body. Though it is a holy and 
tender love, too sacred to be disturbed, that watches 
beside the form once interesting with life and love, it 
is after all a misapplied devotion that comes of spiritual 
blindness. It is like remaining at the cage and the 
cast off feathers and filth when the escaped bird is 
singing in the trees and in the sunlight. The body 
surely decays; reason and experience admonish us 
that we cannot be with it long; in any case we must 
soon leave it for ever and ever ; but with barbaric per- 
versity we embalm it to retard its natural change and 
in proportion to that art do we illustrate materialism 
and distance from a true Christian religion. The 
longer the crepe the shorter the faith. We so cling to 
the earth and all that is earthly and we so treasure 
reverently the last scrap of crumbling bones or mass 
of putridity, while gradually and inevitably the ele- 
ments are claiming their own, that there is nothing 
reasonable, scientific, or, in the highest degree, human 
about it. A clearer intelligence and a higher spiritual 
development will prompt us, as soon as the soul leaves 
the body, to turn from the death bed to the life that 
is now freed, out of pain, happy and probably hovering 
around us for sympathy; to turn immediately from 
corruption to incorruption ; from mortality to that 
which has put on immortality. In proportion to our 
certainty in spirituality we are more resigned to death- 
bed separations and also more composed and reason- 
able in our funeral ceremonies. Sacred grief is none 



THE RESURRECTION, 275 

the less human and noble because blinded. In our 
material education and practices we are loath to give 
up our loved ones and we stay reverently by all that is 
visible until the last moment; but a more spiritual 
training will assuage our grief and open our visions 
even beyond the grave into the open sunlight of death- 
less existence. A change in this philosophy will work 
practical relief to society. Costly funerals are a sad 
burden to the poor. All burials should belong to the 
functions of the civil government and should be uni- 
form, alike for rich and poor, high and low, just as 
any other sanitary regulation. Man and beast instinct- 
ively recoil with horror from a corpse as from a reptile 
and it is only the hardening of the trained class of 
undertakers that gives us what we are accustomed to 
call ''decent burials." The public exposure of a wast- 
ing dead face is absurd and barbarous. Why look 
upon the ashes after having looked upon the flame? 
In our narrow views we go with hallowed feelings to 
the mound that once covered the remains of our be- 
loved. It is a sacred spot and yet it is to us a simple 
deception, for the body has long since assimilated with 
nature, and we might as well go to the middle of the 
sea, where our friends are engulfed, expecting to be 
near them. But it is a social custom and it shall remain 
so until we get something better. Probably our eman- 
cipated spirit friends witness, with wonder and pity, 
our acts over the clay they have just left. The time 
will be when we shall have no more public funerals 



276 ELECTRICITY AND 

over a dead human body than we would over an am- 
putated part of it. Habitual and practical spiritualiza- 
tion of mind, a belief that the disenthralled friend is 
still with us, will banish our present funeral horrors 
of sombre black and their place will be taken by a 
calm religious satisfaction. Now all of our mortuary 
expressions, although they are loving, befit an in- 
fidelity of heart, a society encysted with superstition 
and a grief that would be natural only to a belief in 
black annihilation. In the evolution of spirituality and 
enlightenment, all this will change ; from our anguish 
of the sick room, the aching ankles and brain wrung 
vigils, our hearts will rise into joy and rest with the 
spirit just liberated. 

And moreover this philosophy will make us brave 
because it will render us fearless of bodily dissolution. 
This forms a most joyful, worldly and reasonable 
religion of hope ; a religion without asceticism, without 
care, a daily nerve poise and source of courage, a life- 
assurance without premiums. Society will continue 
to fear death until its spiritual geography is as clearly 
followed as is our earthly geography, which guides us 
over land and sea. All human lives have been and will 
continue to be tragedies until the race is thoroughly 
spiritualized. 

"You know as well as I that death is life, just as our 
daily or momentarily dying body is none the less alive 
and ever recruiting new forces of existence. Without 
death, which is our crepe-like, church— yardy word for 



THE RESURRECTION. 



277 



I 



\ 



change, for growth, there would be no prolongation of 
that which we call Life." — Robert Browning. 

We may pass to eternity as easily as a child lays his 
head down on the pillow and seems to wake right up 
again to find that it is morning. We may as a race 
evolve into angels without ordinary physical death. 

"Behold I show you a mystery. We shall not all 
sleep, but shall be changed, in a moment, in the twink- 
ling of an eye at the last trump." — Paul. 

What imagination can compass the ultimate refine- 
ment and rarefaction of the human body. A million 
years of our present rate of progress in domestic and 
economic science, in hygiene, dietetics, in labor, in 
germ-destroying sciences and in pain-saving devices, 
will produce a mental scope, an elasticity of spirits, a 
clarified mind and perfect bodily health and refine- 
ment equal to our present conception of an angel. 
Consider in all that, abstention from meat eating and 
slaughter of the innocents,^ with an elimination of all 
wine and rum drinking, uses of tobacco and all sorts 
of gluttony and intemperance; with universal refine- 
ment and virtue; stirpiculture, destruction of all bac- 
terial influences in air and food ; recourse to grains and 
fruit for nutrition and to only the refined distillations 
for drink and all the legislative evolution to civil peace 
and order. Possibly then the oxygen and sun's rays 
and the ether which even now we recognize as our 



/ 



278 ELECTRICITY AND 

only source of tissue and which reach us through the 
roundabout way of vegetable and animal food, will 
assimilate with the human form directly from the air 
in the lungs and throughjhe skin by sun baths. ^'Liv- 
ing on air'' and sun rays is quite within the hopes of 
science. Why may not we as well as the oak. Thus 
possibly in that millennial time on earth the body will 
become so refined that its translation into a spirit body 
may be as natural and as instantaneous as the transla- 
tion of water into gas by electricity, or as its slower 
transmution by evaporation. The decay and transla- 
tion of the present body is the same change, the same 
mystery chemically, but by a slower process. 



"These bodies which we now wear belong to the lower 
animals; our minds have already outgrown them and 
i look upon them with contempt. A time will come when 

\ science will transform them, by means which we cannot 

\ conjecture, and which, even if explained to us; we could 

\ not understand — just as the savage cannot understand 

\ electricity, magnetism and steam. Diseases will be ex- 



tirpated, the causes of decay will be removed; immor- 
\ tality will be invented. And then, the earth being small, 
mankind will migrate into space and will cross the air- 
less Saharas which separate planet from planet and sun 
from sun.'' — Winwood Reade. 



The survival of the fittest in this life has its corol- 
lary in the spiritual world in the extinction of the 
uniittest. The economies of nature have no place either 
here or hereafter for dehumanized beings — mere ashen 



THE RESURRECTION, 279 

remains. We see all about us, and can prove by 
criminal records, multitudes of human forms with no 
moral sense than the animals of an African jungle. 
Of what use can they be in eternity? And yet, far 
down in the depths of moral mystery and psychic law, 
there may be seeds of revival when they are disham- 
pered of bodily contagion. 

"For to be carnally minded is death, but to be spirit- 
ually minded is life and peace," 



"In the way of righteousness is life; and in the path- 
way thereof there is no death." 



One, learning that he has within his organization, a 
soul-body independent and imperishable, begins life 
anew with a new philosophy, a new dignity and new 
hopes. He has found the key to animal control, a spur 
to faltering courage and an emancipation of the will. 

There is no study of such rapt interest or profit as 
this etheric study of the resurrection. Once fixing in 
the mind this germ of the philosophy that the soul is 
an elemental substance, then every step and hour of 
life will give it new proofs and new analogies, and will 
lead the belief on to a clear open view of immortality 
and all of its realistic glories. It is asked how shall 
we control the child or instruct the savage unless we 
give God a personality and a throne, and a vicarious 
saviour. The child can be taught to pray to a prin- 




28o ELECTRICITY AND 

I ciple or to a cosmic personality. The conscience of 
the child is fresh from the hand of God and it can 
realize a moral abstraction as soon as it can realize 
anything at all. It can grasp the idea of a surround- 
ing inorganic intelligence and power; its instincts are 
fitted by nature to moral impressions. 



"But some man will say how are the dead raised up 

and with what body do they come It is 

raised a spiritual body.'' — Paul. 



Our science supplements Paul's inquiry and answer. 
There is neither mystery nor miracle in the resurrec- 
tion. Our spiritual body is an ethereal body made up 
by the mind's selection and conservation of the same 
material elements as of the animal body, but in more 
refinement rarefaction, fitter for the upper realms than 
for these spheres that are to be dissolved. It is the 
same spiritual body that struggles, in its hampers, to 
j control the animal body and finally escapes it to go 
onward into an halcyon existence of freedom, purity, 
safety, enlightenment and love. 



The writer has laid down pen to walk in a city 
cemetery for quietude, diversion and rest. There were 
poor and rich, on that public holiday, in the same 
sacred pilgrimages. The laboring man with a pot of 



THE RESURRECTION. 28 1 

flowers was w^ending his way to some lowly grave. 
A workworn woman with sleeping infant and garden 
utensils was trudging wearily along in the burning 
sun on a similar mission. How unselfish and untem- 
poral all this instinctive heart-yearning in the ceme- 
teries for the Beyond. One humble grave, more than 
all the others, reflected this world of love, bereavement 
and Hope. Away back, on the side of a wild jungled 
dell, in the deep shade of a natural thicket, more than 
a weary mile from the public entrance, had been laid 
alone the form of a girl of twenty-one. Just enclosing 
the grave only was a wire-work within which were 
garden tools and bright, growing flowers, the very 
language of affectionate ministrations, of God's imme- 
diate presence and of our immortality. But most 
touching of all, telling, it may be, of an humble home 
of toil, want and discouragement, of the anguish of 
the sick bed and final parting, was a legend inscribed 
upon the cheap, weather-beaten head board, embodying 
faith and prophecy: ''Mamma, God calls me;'' ap- 
parently the last words of a beloved daughter ever 
sounding in the mother's heart. Perhaps they had 
been alone together in destitution, pain, a gloomy 
world and sorrow, and the poor fragile girl, handed 
down as a blessing from heaven for so short a time, 
was the angel and forerunner of their eternal reunion 
in the only safe and restful place. Those flowers and 
that hope are kept fresh day after day and year after 
year, and the belief by that unschooled mother that 



282 ELECTRICITY. 

she shall, with sensible realization, clasp a^ain and 
forever her dear child can no more be torn from her 
heart than existence itself. Is her belief a folly? Then \ 
the creation of the world is a folly and God is left 
alone with his temporary playthings. Utter who can 
such blasphemy of the All-wise Genius who miracu- 
lously constructed all things and whose present and 
direct will assists us to our very next mortal breath. 



INDEX. 



Atoms, beginning of the uni- 
verse, 96 

" sexed, 75 

" life of, 84 
Appetites, none in heaven, 60 
Animal magnetism, 17, 180, 

100 
Analogies, 19, 23 
Abbott, Lyman S., 202 
Animals' souls, 238 
Animalism, 196 



Cato on hypnotism, 52 
Cleveland, Grover, 54 
Consciousness, not matter, 60 
Climate and dynamos, 191 
Copula of immortality, 11, 15, 

94, 235 
Ccx., life of, 69 
Crystals, life of, 96 
Cumberland, Stuart, 122 
Corelli, Marie, 126 
Christian criticism, 251 
Chemical soul, 86 



Butterflies, 23 
Bits of God, II, 14 
Bacon, 27, 74 

Beecher on energy and God, 89 
Blackwell, Mrs. A. B., 96, 194 
Bible and Psychism, 108 
Blood propulsion, 135 
Body, sinful, 60, 196 
Body, instrument of expres- 
sion, 245 
Berkeleyism, 62 
Bryan, Wm. J., 240 



Children, government of, 50 
Command, power of, 35 



Dreams, 10 

Drummond, 94, 257 

Dryden, 16 

Disease from electricity, 129 

Death, there is none, 246 



Ether, luminiferous, 11 
'' the body of God, 10 
" connate with mind, 12 
Ethereal fields, 16 
" body, 91 
" substance, 12 
" whirling, 14 
•• foundation of phys- 
ics, 91 



283 



284 



INDEX. 



Ethereal materialism, 106 

" philosophy, dignity 
of, 184 
Electricity is the motion of 
ether, 14 
" human, 33 

" in motive force, 14 

" is material, 145 

Emerson, 29, 35 
Energy is God, 89 
"Electrocution," iii 



Free agency, 59 
Fiske, Prof. John, yy 
Funerals, reform, 273 
Flesh and blood, 196, 254 
Forms, spirit, 90 



Goethe, 38 

Gradations of organisms, 87, 

216 
God, the body of, 12 

" we are bits of, 11, 14 

" in the atoms, 86 

" in cell life, 70 

" in the ether, 13, 14, 108 

" in electricity, 108 

" with us, 234 

" Personal in the universe, 

13 
Origin of life, 70 
George, Henry, 19 
Genius, 271 
Ghost, 15 



Human magnetism, 100 
Hammond, Dr. Wm. A., 79 
Hypnotism, 159 

" social, 124 

Hope, or conserving force, 10, 

239 
Hillis, Dr. Dwight, 174 



Intuition, inherited knowledge, 
10, 19 

" direct sight, 228 

Instinct, 228 
Idiots and imbeciles saved, 

235 
Infants, 235 
Ideal soul for all, 249 
Innate immortality, 251 
Individuality, 258 
Idealism, 61 



Luminiferous ether is God, 11 

Life, origin of, 69 

Ladd, Prof., 78 

Lodge, electricity is ether, 148 

Location of spirit, yy 

Language after instinct, 133, 

176 
Love, a conserving force, 83 
Life principle, the, 144 

M 

Matter and mind, connate, 11 
" moved only by matter, 
152 



INDEX, 



285 



Matter, gradations of, 87 
" rarefaction of, 87 
Mind and matter inseparable, 
12 
" radiation of, 26 
" and soul synonymous, 60 
" is spatial, 12 
" is matter, 12 
Magnetism is matter, 16 

" in will power, 26 

" in horseshoe, 16 

" human, 17, 100 

" experiments, 100 

" vegetable, 103 

Military influence, 2>Z 
Materialism, 59, 79 
Magic, 185 

Morals, reflex power of, 10, 230 
McKay, Prof., 14 
"Mode of Motion," 17 
Mentality and mind differ, 61 
Meredith, Dr. R. R., no 
Mesmeric literature, 180 
Materializations, 109 
MacLaren, Ian, 212 

N 

Napoleon, 27, 39, 44 

New heavens and new earth, 

247 
Nexus of mind and matter, 6y 



Political hypnotism, 179 

Ptolmyism, 23 

Personal influence, 2>2ij 38 

" radiation, 17 

" magnetism, 10 
Positive and passive people, 

42, 50 
Poe, Edgar A., on ether, 86 
Public magnetism, 131, 179 
Pentecostal etherism, 99 
Personal desire, 127 
Public magnetism, 105, 130 
Panics and stampedes, 179 
Pantheism, 234 
Prayer is etheric, 268 
Pitt, Wm., 47 
Psychism, 99 

" phenomena, 119,134 



Q 



Quantitative will power, 56 



Reflex power of morals, 239 
Resurrection, 183, 193 
Religion of etherism, 276 
Radiation of mind, 29 
Rhythm, law of, 141 
Rarefactions, 221 



Oratory, magnetic, 173 
Oxygen and blood, 136 
" breath of life, 140 
" propels the blood, 108 
Organisms, densities of, 216 



Soul of infants, 250 

" defined, 11, 18, 24, 57 
" innate in matter, 58 
" location of, yy 



286 



INDEX. 



Soul, quantitative, 28 
" independent of body, 59 
" substance of, 71 
" of the world, 66 
" in chemistry, 86 
" and mind synonymous, 61 
" corporeity, 15 
Spenser on soul, 18 
Spiritual body, 231 
" substance, 71 
" form, 90, 107, 249 
" location, yy 
Spiritualism, 199 

" unhealthy, 227 

" theology, 232 

Social cohesion, 26 

" infection, 105, 136 
Sex in matter, 117 
Sequard, Dr. Brown, 83 
Substance, ethereal, 13 

" immaterial, 24 

Sympathy, 238 
Spontaneous generation, 186 
Susceptibility, 204, 209, 266 
Selfish people, 41 
Synchronism between body and 

soul limited, 81, 83 
Sixth sense, 177 
Scott, Walter, 225 



Talmage, Dr., on angels, 215 
Tesia, electricity is ether, 148 
Telepathy, 121 
Telegraphy, wireless, 89 
Transmutation, 219 

u 

Universe is mind and matter, 

II 

" is God's body, 13 

V 

Vegetable magnetism, 103 
Vitality, 140 
Voice, electric, 143 
Visions of the dying, 10, 83 
Vibrations, 10, 20, 2>^ 
Vicarious sacrifice, 244 

w 
Will force, physical, 58 

" free, 59 
Wireless telegraphy, 205 
Women and spiritualism, 207 
Wolseley, Gen., 47 



X 



X Ray, 132 



